How do you rank 52 bosses based on difficulty? I was reading through Larisa's [url=http://www.pinkpigtailinn.com/2010/05/my-ranking-list-over-raid-bosses-of.html]treatise on ranking the WotLK bosses from easy to hard[/url] when that question came to mind: how do you rank difficulty? There are certainly quantitative methods involving calculating how many guilds have cleared a certain boss, how many attempts does it take for the average raid to make it through an encounter, or how many guilds have [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/4584/the-light-of-dawn/][ The Light of Dawn ][/url] achievement. We could also approach the question qualitatively by asking ourselves why so many raid leaders think Sindragosa is harder than Professor Putricide, discover why many guilds that kill LK seem to only kill Heroic Gunship, and evaluate what level of raid endurance is required to break a boss like Heroic BQ Lana'thel since she is nine bosses deep into ICC. There are many bosses who seem difficult at first, but after breaking them immediately put them on farm status. Their gimmicks are just that: gimmickry. Once your team knows the gimmick, they rarely fall for it again and the boss dies week after week after week while random team members talk about politics or play terrible pop music over vent. On the other hand, there are encounters like Lich King that will always be hard regardless of gear level or raid awareness. The RNG clusterf*ck factor is extremely high on certain fights and well after they are on farm, still pose a stumbling block to a hardened, experienced raid that is just a little too burned out to climb and take the hill again this week. So, I sat down and started to consider my own raiding history. I have fought every boss in WotLK. Except for LK, I have fought every boss in Hard Mode as well. I have destroyed most of them as two classes, sometimes three, and been a Main Tank, an Off Tank, a melee DPS, and a Ranged DPS for several of them now. I started to review my fellow bloggers "difficulty" criteria and saw that my fellow Descendant of Draenor, Aezil, had [url=http://hybridtax.blogspot.com/2010/05/52-bosses.html]added his voice to the boss ranking debate[/url]. Given Larisa's and Aezil's previous lists documenting the high and low points of the Boss fights, I decided to do the same for Heroic Difficulty. My scale consists of a few key points: - How hard was the boss in equipment with the same gear score as what drops off the boss? - After broken, how hard was the boss week after week? - If not in ICC, do I want to go kill that boss in Hard Mode now? (Can I pug it?) - What achievements made certain bosses switch from Easy to Hard mode? [b]20. Lord Jaraxxus [/b] Strangely, this was the hardest spot to fill. Lord Jaraxxus is almost a loot pinata reward for clearing HM-Beasts. He has a lot of gimmicks and a lot of debuffs flying around, but really it's a straight tank and spank hard mode. Whether I put Lord Marrowgar or Jaraxxus in this spot really came down to which boss I personally had more trouble with. I enjoy Jaraxxus, few bosses have stealable buffs that make Mages perform at a godly DPS level. Ultimately, that won him the top (bottom) spot in my list. Let the QQ commence.. [b]19. Lord Marrowgar [/b] AKA "the guy who never drops the damned caster belt". I have to admit to having been relatively slow to master this encounter. While I generally do not die, I spend an extraordinary amount of time running around since he seems to cling to me like I have his favorite biscuits in my backpack during Bonestorm. The fact that Bonestorm does not stop the Bone Graveyard is a minor hiccup compared to other bosses in ICC, even heroic Lord Marrowgar is easier than regular Putricide and beyond. [b]18. Freya [/b] Freya is a hard enough fight before [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/3187/knock-knock-knock-on-wood-25-player/][ Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood ][/url] and a pretty crazy fight afterwards. Much like Mimiron, this is one of those fights where attempting the Hard Mode takes a regularly difficult fight and ratchets it up into the stratosphere of awesome. With a woman who drops bombs everywhere she goes and the deathstar laser sun beams, this fight is a gift that keeps on giving. Even now, running UldHM Drake runs, it is not one of the fights that I put down in the "gimme" column. Hell, even her trash wipes raids regularly.. [b]17. Twin Val'kyrs [/b] Once the orb strategy is figured out, this fight becomes almost trivial. Many times, I have fought heroic Twins, witnessed a 50% heal go off, and still defeated them. The only reason this fight ranks this high is because of where it is in the instance, the required gear to blast through the encounter focusing a single twin, and the amount of dancing required to properly avoid vortexes and attack shields. Is it harder than Beasts? Probably not, but I struggled with placing it above Freya. [b]16. Beasts of Northrend [/b] Nothing makes me feel more like a gladiator in this arena dungeon than the Beasts of Northrend encounter. Recalling my youth and reading stories of gladiators fighting lions, tigers, and other strange and exotic beasts in the Colosseum, this encounter goes straight to the reason I play Warcraft. A three phase slug fest with the best Northrend has to offer from a huge centaur to an even huger Yeti. In heroic mode, the difficulty level jumps a full notch to give absolutely no leeway for slow dps, lapses of judgement, or laconic reaction times. The Beasts no longer wait for you to finish them off before the next set jumps on you like a pack of hungry wolves waiting for dinner. Where else can you fight two Jormungar and a Yeti at the same time? No where. [b]15. Valithria Dreamwalker [/b] Given the changes going from the Dream to the Nightmare and the extra healing required due to health depleting, Valithria is not to be taken lightly. I have to say that as an arcane mage, I have a lot of fun on Valithria since the encounter plays to my strengths and allows me to open a can of arcane blast on anything that is moving (mostly thanks to our bad ass DoD tank squad composed of Pkizmet, Drecca, Klockerr, and Bretthew in both 10's and 25's teams). While switching to hardmodes might be a real step up for a healer, since I have never played one, I can delight in saying this hardmode is not that hard to me. =) [b]14. Mimiron [/b] [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/firefighter/][ Firefighter ][/url], /thread. An incredibly difficult and detailed fight. This was previously my lipnus achievement for "good raider" vs "just a raider". Firefighter is no walk in the park now and never was back when 226 gear was the norm. This fight has a lot of stuff going on all the time and when you press the big red button that says not too, you add a walking, creeping fire to the whole dance of death with Mimiron's machinations. Even now, I like nothing in raiding more than bashing that big red button and doing my best to smoke down Mim's machines with 9-24 other people who know how to do it right, because when it's done right, it's a real beautiful fight. [b]13. Rotface [/b] I would file this under "more and harder". Heroic Rotface and normal Rotface are pretty much the same encounter, Heroic is just more ooze damage that hits harder. The ooze kiting tank has to run his trailing oozes through the middle a bit more to avoid being rooted, infection victims take 25% healing instead of 50% healing, and there is a vile gas mechanic involved. I suspect for most HM teams, this encounter was just a speed bump on the way to the Professor, provided you had the original encounter down.. [b]12. Sindragosa [/b] I know I will get flack for putting her this low, but I don't view Sindy as a very hard encounter. Move the debuffed casters out of the raid, clear buffs more often, make an extra spot for the extra beacon, move along. If your DPS core is even half awake, this is a pretty easy encounter as far as HM's go. I think [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/4620/all-you-can-eat-25-player/][ All You Can Eat ][/url] might be slightly harder than the hardmode, maybe I'm just crazy. Maybe I really am living in an ivory tower of raiding or perhaps, collectively, the raiding skill of every raider in WoW has just increased to a point where these mechanics no longer seem that challenging. Either way, Sindragosa HM should be a single blip on the raid radar compared to the incoming flotilla of pain that other ICC HM's represent. Of course, this is probably the fight that got AVR banned.. [b]11. Faction Champions [/b] To be honest, I had a hard time rating the "hardest" encounter in ToGC. Time after time, Faction Champions ends raids, not kills them, ends them. Sure, the well developed, well oiled machines pick through the place at light speed, but they don't really have trouble with Anub or Faction Champs. Ultimately, Faction Champs lost due to Anub being just "too hard" for a lot of teams to complete anymore. Eventually, even the most green of PUGs still makes it through Faction Champs in current gear (3.3.3). Faction Champs is unpredictable, they target on a whim, agro at will, use every mean spirited trick in the book, but ultimately that chaos makes this fight very predictable: Blow up the healer as fast as possible, stay the hell out of hellfire, then use man advantage to widdle down the Champs. Almost identical to it's normal mode counterpart. [b]10. Anub'arak[/b] Lets take a fight that involves adds management, boss healing, and boss kiting and kick it up a notch. While in normal mode, Anub can pretty much be killed by anyone just by assigning a hunter to full time orb duty, the Hard Mode is just about the exact opposite. Sure, your tanks will be taking more damage from having to deal with more Nerubian Burrowers armed with a shadow attack and you will have to find a way to deal with Burrowers during the burn down phase at the end, but nothing compares to the snow patch change. Limited to six frost patches which you must carefully guard the entire fight, properly kiting a giant beetle monster never became more fun (or important). This is still a challenge for ICCHM 25 teams, in my opinion. [b]9. Blood Princes [/b] [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/72998/shadow-prison/]Shadow Prison[/url], you are a son of a b*tch. For a class that likes to move about in a fight that requires you to move about, Blood Princes becomes an entirely different fight in Heroic mode for a mage. All ranged are now required to watch the skies with terror hoping a Kinetic Bomb does not spawn over their heads (incredibly difficult camera view to maintain, btw). Melee are taking debuff damage when they avoid vortexes and doing the "are you going to the right or am I?" empowered shock vortex chicken dance just became a recipe for both of you to die from shadow damage. A hard fight, a fun one, and definitely worthy of being ranked in the top half. [b]8. Yogg-Saron [/b] This is probably one of the choices that I will receive the most feedback for. Other guilds seemed to have a real hard time with Yogg, but by the time we made it past Mimiron, this fight seemed like a walk in the park. We used a ferrying method to defeat the Guardians and then basically told everyone "Don't stand near the clouds". Not exactly rocket surgery. In 226 gear, this became a DPS race tied up into a CC race where the ability to run faster seemed to be the only thing holding you back from defeating tentacles as fast as they could spawn. [i]* Note: I have never done [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/3164/alone-in-the-darkness-25-player/][ Alone in the Darkness ][/url]. Perhaps this fight is incredibly more difficult without Thorim killing Immortal Guardians in phase 3, but I find that hard to believe. At some point, I'll find a team to head down there and beat it for that final achievement and perhaps change my opinion of this fight. [/i] [b]7. Blood Queen Lana'thel [/b] BQ is one of those bosses where you find out if your raid team showed up to play or not. Heroic BQ is where you get punished if they left their berserker DPS back in Dalaran Trade Chat. Given the hard berserk timer and the fact that for the last minute BQ is doing 40% more raid damage via Shroud of Sorrow, everyone really has to bring their A game to down this boss. Hard fight, hard boss, excellent mechanics, and you even get to be a vampire for a while.. [b]6. Lady Deathwhisper [/b] Whether you are trying [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/4611/full-house-25-player/]Full House[/url] or competing to kill her heroically, Lady Deathwhisper is no walk in the park, that's for sure. When we were 7/12 HM, Lady D was one of the five who stood against us for several weeks while we tried to master dealing with so, so many adds that just keep coming and coming through the whole fight while constantly watching that enrage timer tick down and down and down. We tried putting the ranged in several places, moved around the kill priorities, and did a fair bit of yelling, but eventually she was killed. Still, not the easiest fight in the world by a long shot. [b]5. [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/4017/earth-wind-fire-25-player/]Earth, Wind, and Fire[/url] [/b] A truly magnificent achievement that turns three loot piñatas into a crazy dance of timing, logistics, and tank stretching. Which boss is pulled first? Where should we fight them? How little damage can a paladin tank do to Archevon and still keep agro over the healers and not kill him by accident (again)? This raid achievement is rarer than almost any other besides [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/4584/the-light-of-dawn/][ The Light of Dawn ][/url], maybe. The definition of "Top 5" material. [b]4. Malygos [/b] What more do I have to say? Who else skips the weekly when Malygos Must Die comes up? Who else remembers competing for [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/1400/realm-first-magic-seeker/][ Magic Seeker ][/url] and still failing to master the encounter for weeks? I know I do. Malygos is still hard because your average raider has forgotten about the damned third phase drake flight. You know, that phase where you get to basically use the worst camera angles in the game to stare at a blinding disco light of healing auras and hope you are spamming the correct sequence (1112) to stack your flame debuffs on poor Maly before everyone "moves to the right", ignoring the fact that you are now raiding in three dimensions and your raid leader means rotate anti-clockwise in 2D. I enjoy fighting Malygos, one of the few fights I still get to arcane blast my ass off, do something cool by flying around on a disc to avoid bombs and kill some minions, and feel like a total f*ckup on a drake all in the same ten minutes. ([url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/1875/you-dont-have-an-eternity-25-player/][ You Don't Have An Eternity ][/url], you say? Fugitaboutit. ) [b]3. Deathbringer Saurfang[/b] A soft enrage timer coupled with a boss healing mechanic rolled into a minion killing fight where the minions one-shot anyone who isn't a tank. What isn't to love? Our first kill had five marks active when Saurfang finally bit the dust. I have a screenshot of the [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/4632/heroic-storming-the-citadel-25-player/][ Heroic: Storming the Citadel ][/url] achievement with my iceblock up while trying to soak a mark to avoid wiping us (yet again). That's how razor thin this fight can be. Like every good fight, every player has to be on their toes, skills and utility spells that rarely see the light of day become extremely clutch, and the DPS cannot lose a second of time busting down the "Heart of Draenor". [i]* On a side note, I don't know about anyone else, but I was ready to murder the WoW Dev who put the roleplay intro into that fight and made it unable to be skipped. Almost as annoying as "Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic BETRAYS YOU! .. and I repeat this phrase over and over again!". Okay, maybe not that annoying. [/i] [b]2. Professor Putricide [/b] +900% damage debuff anyone? Nothing rivals the unbound plague madness that is Professor HM. Even good DPS have trouble with the missing tear gas, mind the plague, double ooze phase changes. A full head above the rest of ICC and anything else in the game, except... [b]1. The Lich King* [/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/Arthas_dark.jpg[/img] Regular LK is a dance of death with the King of Icecrown Citadel. The encounter is hard for everyone involved and requires good timing, good group synergy, and no screw ups. Phase change, after phase change, after phase change. It's a workout, even for a guy sitting in front of an LCD screen. I don't look forward to triple HP Valks, whole raid Harvested Souls, or wicked spirits.. hail to the King, baby, and kudos to Blizzard for designing a truly worthy encounter for the namesake of the expansion and the most popular villain in contemporary MMO's. [b]Honorable Mentions: [/b] - [b]Gunship[/b] : One of the few ICC Hard Modes to not make the list. I see "LF1M ICC10, must have Kingslayer" all the time in trade chat, I know they want a Kingslayer just for HM Gunship. Is there such a thing as hard mode Karazhan Chess? No? Neither was there a hardmode gunship. We did [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/4612/im-on-a-boat-25-player/][ I'm on a Boat ][/url] during HM Gunship on the first try. - [b]Festergut [/b] : Professor Putricide makes a cameo appearance during Heroic Festergut to throw Malleable Goo at various team members while fighting the hard five minute enrage timer. If you didn't already master Malleable Goo dodging in regular Professor, this might have been slightly harder for you here, but really it should be a walk in the park for (almost) free 277's. [i]* the Lich King is the only HM boss I have not fought heroically. Just looking at the fight, I have no trouble understanding why it takes the best teams in the world weeks to figure this encounter out. I look forward to fighting through it with my DoD brethren and know that we have the smarts and determination to eventually get it down.[/i] So, how did my Hardmode list stack up with your expectations? Do you agree with Sindy being so low and Malygos being so high? Can you even remember when Malygos was progression content? =)

This week's [url=http://www.blogazeroth.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=2266]Blog Azeroth[/url] topic is "What are you doing to get ready for Cataclysm?" and today is Friday, so I figured I might offer an homage (blatantly copy) to one of my favorite bloggers, [url=http://twitter.com/anexxia]@Anexxia[/url] of [url=http://www.furlinedteacup.com/bibleofdreams/2010/05/friday-five-5-ways-im-getting-ready-for-cataclysm.html]Bible of Dreams[/url], and integrate some "Friday Five" into this post. I have to admit that right now I am not absolutely certain what my main will be come Cataclysm, nor what there is to do in Cataclysm that needs to be prepared for now, so my list is somewhat ambiguous and just paints the broad strokes of my increasingly granular Cataclysm starting gate strategy. [b]1) Wrapping up Azeroth as we know it today.[/b] Lets face it, this might be the last time we get to see the barren version of the Barrens or Desolace. This is the last time Thousand Needles isn't a lake. A great deal of what we regard as "the old world" is going away. Being an unrepentant Achievement Whore, I can't help but think a great many of the old achievements are going the way of level 60 Onyxia and becoming Feats of Strength or just feats that cannot be accomplished anymore. I still have a great many feats left to accomplish on my mage: finally finish the damned [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/46/world-explorer/]World Explorer[/url] achievements (I've been doing them piece meal for months), wrap up [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/Classic_Dungeonmaster/]Classic Dungeonmaster[/url], and utilize one of the few remaining Saturday's between now and Cataclysm to win the Derby and finally finish [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/1516/accomplished-angler/]Accomplished Angler[/url]. I had plans to be [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/battlemaster/]Battlemaster Ccyd[/url] by Cataclysm/Rated Battlegrounds, but unless I rediscover my love of WSG, that just doesn't look like it is going to happen. [b]2) Prepping my Hunter in case the Blizzard rework of the class makes them awesome at 85.[/b] I have to admit that I love playing Hunters. I have had one in every expansion and it was my main through most of Vanilla when I was in a very competitive raiding guild on Eredar. With Hunters finally losing mana, I no longer have to worry about whether or not I'm in Viper or about the efficiency of my leveling DPS rotation since Focus will regenerate over time and with certain shots. I am looking forward to seeing what Blizz has in store for one of my favorite classes. [b]3) Strategically taking names I want for my goblin alts =) [/b] I know it's mean spirited and probably against the EULA, but I have two character slots sitting on my account with level 1 orcs with names I want for my goblin rogue and goblin shaman. This probably makes me a bad person, but I'll deal with the karmic repercussions when the time comes. [b]4) Making friends within my guild's 10-man community[/b] I anticipate scaling back my raiding efforts to just 10-man teams after Cataclysm goes live, so long as 10's are no longer second class citizens. I admit that I mostly enjoy 25's for the elevated rewards (both gear and achievements). I don't think the 25's environment is more enjoyable as raids switch from conversations *with* friends to broadcasts *at* raiders. I have had the joy of finally hitting ICC10 with one of the better 10's teams in my guild this week and it has only reconfirmed my earlier thoughts regarding problems I have with 25's, they're just too impersonal. Provided Blizz backs up their earlier announcements that they plan to make 10's and 25's equal, I don't anticipate hitting 25's after Deathwing rends a hole in the landscape. [b]5) Stockpiling gold for "Old Weather Flying" and Ms. Pilton's new fashionable bag![/b] While "Old Weather Flying" might be slight hyperbole, we all know it's coming: the fashionable gold sinks. I have the mounts, the bags, the bike, a Kirin Tor ring on my DK, and both a Grand Ice and Grand Vendor Mammoth on my mage. I loathe to admit it, but I like the fashionable gold sinks, they give me something to buy instead of just filling my bank account with useless yellow pixels (now I have useless mammoth shaped pixels that carry my friends). At some point, I hope they sell a two-seater flying mount like the X-21 so I can fly my wife around full time instead of just when she can hop on the bike. On a side note: Does it seem like these posts are coming earlier and earlier? We don't even have a release date and we still have an NDA. When WotLK dropped, I started commenting about getting ready for my DK in Sept (WotLK dropped in Nov), it's May and we probably have six months of Lich King left. Enjoy it! So, that's it. What are you doing to get ready for Cataclysm?

I have to politely disagree with [url=http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/the-school-of-hard-knocks/]Cynwise's attempt to lure more people into the battlegrounds by placating the PvE Achievement Hunters[/url]. I think the battlegrounds are already weighed down by the inept socials who fancy themselves warlords. Children's Week has only exacerbated this situation by flooding Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm with cross-faction communicated treaties and a weird form of flag detente. Needless to say, this week has been a real blast for me and I cannot help but think that it is because I am such an asshole. However, I would not want this to become the normal state of things. We already have 10-20% AFKers dragging the team down, people who fight away from the flag when they should fight on it, people who fight at the flag when they should be taking towers, people who fight in the middle of the field of strife when they should be fighting on the road, people who fight on the road when they should be fighting at the flag, and now you want to add warriors running the dragon slayer rotation wearing quest gear and heirlooms to the mix. My point is, we don't need to lure the PvE crowd into the Battlegrounds: Cataclysm will do this for us with Rated BG's. So, what has made this week so much fun? A few things that I have gotten kicks out of and a few easy achievements that have helped: - Killing Flag Carriers in WSG has gotten me a lot of the way toward [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/persistent_defender/][Persistent Defender][/url] and [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/Supreme_Defender/][Supreme Defender][/url]. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/frenzied_defender/][Frenzied Defender][/url] was also attained while pissing off pretty much every PvE achievement whore in the Horde Flag Room. - Set up detente in Tower Point spamming /wait to get my [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/tower_defense/][Tower Defense][/url] achievement. - After finding the detente in AV around the towers, I have spent many games this week wandering tower to tower killing the lone red spamming /wait at me. - I have spent no fewer than 11 EotS games grabbing the flag as fast as possible and wandering around the whole game without capping it. What are the fun things you guys have been doing this week? Surely I am not alone in abusing the achievement hunters. Enjoy your saturday! * the observant amongst you would note that I have not posted in a while, unfortunately that is likely to continue through at least next week as my CISSP exam is a week from tomorrow and it requires much prep. Hopefully abusing carebears tomorrow in BG's courtesy of some nasty intentions will hold you over until then.

This weekend has been one of progression for the 25-man DoD raid team. Working Heroic 25 ICC for the first time, we have progressed through Festergut and will have Rotface next week easily. It is more important now, than ever, to maintain the highest care and the most disciplined approach to raiding. As we learn and beat the encounters, the new 277 gear will flow and they will become easier every week, but right now,they are still refreshingly hard for us. This has been a welcomed change after weeks of working through Sindy on easy-mode in less than four hours and spending the other four working LK25. So, the disciplined and rigorous approach I generally take to progression raiding has returned in full. I realized this morning that I go through logs every Monday morning to analyze my raids over the weekend during downtime at work. Frankly, I need to. I am far from the top DPS'er in [url=http://www.descendantsofdraenor.com/]Descendants of Draenor[/url]. In fact, I am one of the worst in the guild. Frequently, I am between 8th and 15th or 8.5-10k dps, depending on the fight. I hover in the bottom half of the DPS ranks. Like all scrubs, I attributed this gear at first. Everyone had better gear than me and so everyone should be doing more DPS. I observe with respect (and no small amount of jealousy) players like Setsero or Aeden who seem to effortlessly run the table on damage at will. I could complain that it is my class and not my skill or gear that is at fault, but we will look at that later. After every fight, I check the charts and note down the differential between Setsero and I. I check his spell makeup and the average hits/crits of each. This is usually the starting point for a long monday morning where I look for rotations and try to spot the exact point where he pulls away from me. I started to analyze my logs rigorously and hunt down tricks and tests on the beloved EJ forums and Bosskillers in order to close the gap. That gap is very significant to me. What started as almost 3500 DPS has closed to 1000. However, something terrible has happened to cause me to seriously re-evaluate the reasons why my DPS is ~11% worse than Setsero's: my gear has passed his. What started out two months ago as a crutch excuse has been disproven and like a good, rational scientist, I have started to check my premises. [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/festergut-heroic-logs-pic.png[/img] There are really only seven reasons that your DPS is worse than someone else's: [b]0) You do not know the fight.[/b] As I said in a [url=http://hordeofone.phreakre.com/blog/view/21]previous post[/url], knowing the fight is the best DPS increase possible. Watching videos and knowing the strategy will keep you alive longer and being alive is always better DPS than being dead. A scrub in quest greens standing in the right spot puts out more DPS than the 6k+ GS Mage who died because he didn't get out of the damned slime spray fast enough. (You will sense a theme in today's examples =) ) [b]1) Your gear is lower quality (264 vs 232).[/b] All other things being equal, your gear is the largest factor in determining what your damage potential is. Note I said "potential". Your gear will only allow you to unlock that potential and turn it into damage. [b]2) Your spell rotations are wrong. [/b] Many people would call this "skill". My damage potential is gigantic. I crossed the 6000 GS barrier last night, but the actuality is I might as well be wearing badge gear for all the help it is doing me. I suspect my "gap" exists somewhere in this area. I am running the standard ABx4MBAM rotation to death, [url=http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/0wfkemukfu4kn3k8/log/?s=10781&e=11119]this log[/url] shows that I am a damned ABx4MBAM missile throwing machine. Arcane combo, arcane combo, arcane combo. However, I am still getting killed on the meter. I would agree with calling this "skill". This is where the Archmage, who knows his class inside and out, starts to pull away from the newbs reading EJ and watching videos. He knows that sometimes one rotation is higher DPS than another. He is weaving instants without thinking while running around to avoid puddles and to drop off slimes. The Archmage's attention is focused on the fight, the damage is incidental to keeping himself alive and riding the highest possible DPS crest at all times. [b]3) Your talents are not set up correctly.[/b] The talents are [url=http://elitistjerks.com/f75/]mathed to death on a great many sites[/url]. For a long time, I ran with the recommended cookie cutter specs and did very well (outside of 25-man w/ DoD). However, since I 'upped my game' and moved into the pro-leagues, I have found that the cookie cutter specs are not enough. I still have [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/44413/incanters-absorption/]2/3 Incanter's Absorption[/url] because IA is still a boost to me. I defended [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/t/arcane_stability/]3/5 Arcane Stability[/url] last week to @Psynister but have since dropped it due to many boss AoE's not causing pushback. The cookie cutter specs are only there to get you a good basis from which to work out of, but if you do deviate from them, be sure you know why. We all have horror stories of 57/3/11 Mages without [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/29447/torment-the-weak/]Torment of the Weak[/url] and Warriors who never trained taunt because they never planned to tank. Don't be that guy, know why you have your points where you do and have the math and testing to back them up. [b]4) Your gear is not enchanted/gemmed correctly.[/b] This goes along with knowing your talents. Arcane Mages gemming crit are doing themselves a disservice. Mages gemming Hit are likewise doing the same thing. Have the right enchant and the right gems in the right spots to get you going. However, as big a deal as people make out of enchants and gem choices, they are really not that large in the overall scheme of things. Sure, enchanted is better than not and gemming stamina is a dumb idea unless you are a tank, but in the end, they might add up to ~2% of your overall DPS. So unless you are [url=http://www.stabilizedeffortscope.com/]a serious douchebag[/url], don't sweat how many +sp/+haste vs +sp gems you need for each and every socket until you change out a piece of gear for an upgrade and have to buy the new enchants and gems anyways. This gives you a chance to re-evaluate your gear at periodic points and see which direction you are really moving. Constant re-gemming is expensive and the gain is not all that awesome for the two thousand gold it will probably cost you. [b]5) This fight does not lend itself well to your classes strengths [/b] Some fights, you just can't win. It speaks well for Blizzard that when you look at [url=http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Icecrown_Citadel/dps/]Top DPS worldwide for ICC25[/url] on World of Logs, each pure DPS class except rogue has a fight that they appear to be the best at. Fury warriors seem to excel at Marrowgar and LK, Hunters at Lady Deathwhisper, Druids at Festergut, Warlocks at Blood Prince Council, Mages at Blood Queen Lana'Thel, and DK's at Sindragosa. Of course, when you tick it up to Heroic ICC25, the fury warrior DPS just seems to run the table on every single boss. Sometimes, you just cannot be #1. Don't fret, do your best, compare yourself against the best Mages in the world at any given fight and use that as your benchmark for winning. Consider that they may be using a special talent tree just for that fight and you might only be able to get within delta of their DPS curve. Even if you end up short, you have done an amazing job of holding up your end of the short stick and hopefully those who are excelling at the current fight are doing a bit of carrying. [b]6) Your class is not properly balanced at this point in time. [/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/zach_ghostcrawler_nerfgun.jpg[/img] After you have checked all six of the other reasons, you get to say "my class sucks right now". At this point, you can go post on the general forums and get shouted down by the social M&S who have nothing but anecdotal evidence and ad hominem attacks to counter your well reasoned and scientifically established claims. Oh well, the glories of the badge system is that you can reroll into a great class (warrior anyone?) and get it up to speed pretty quickly for ICC25. In closing, your goal should be to do your best. Analyzing your character to death, as I am prone to do, has diminishing returns. Eking out the most from your gear and time is rewarding and a fun past time for some people. However, I think everyone can reach a baseline of acceptable competency with their class if they consider this list and give it a few minutes of thought when they receive an upgrade. After all, if you are not playing to at least average capacity, why are you playing at all?

With the release of the sparkly space pony yesterday, the discussion of RMT (Real Money Trading/Transactions) has been resurrected in the WoW community. Mostly, this is class warfare at it's finest with varying opinions of "lol star pony" to "when can I buy epics?!?!" arguments going on. Before I even began this article, I knew that I would be presenting an unpopular opinion, but it is one that I feel is vastly underrepresented in the WoW blogosphere as of late. So, here we go: I have no problem with the star pony being for sale through the BlizzStore and I bought not one, but two of them. I cannot wait for Blizzard to figure out their next BlizzStore item that I can buy my little Mage and Hunter to flashy them up. If it is an item of equal or better value as my BoA Star Pony that flies at 310% on two of my three active characters, I'll probably buy two of them too. Ultimately, I cannot help but feel that a great deal of the problem with the Celestial Steed being for sale on the BlizzStore is that a good chunk of players have no access to it and will complain about anything they do not have access too. A minority of players, though it has never been larger than now at the end of WotLK, have access to the 310% proto-drakes. I have three of them between my DK and my mage. I know that even now, defeating [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/3189/firefighter-25-player/]Firefighter[/url] and [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/3163/one-light-in-the-darkness-25-player/]One Light in the Darkness[/url] is no easy feat. Becoming a gladiator worth getting a 310% mount means you are probably one of the top 0.1% of players in the world in your bracket (and millions of miles above the guys who criticize arena as "pillar humping/team composition manipulation" competition). These mounts are not criticized for being exclusive because the players feel the recipients have done something worthy of being rewarded with this type of item. However, the Star Pony is receiving completely different treatment. The average WoW player allocates $15/month to their WoW play and will not tolerate a penny more. They believe with their $15 they have access to all that WoW has to offer. I believe they feel threatened by the BlizzStore's offerings because they either refuse or cannot pay for digital items. Some have attempted to circumvent their lack of out of game cash by paying in game cash for the Star Pony. An entrepreneurial guild member in DoD yesterday was offering 6,000g for the mount. He had in game cash and was willing to pay for in game items. Someone will eventually take him up on it. While many argue about the relative merits of paying real cash for digital pixels, I believe [url=http://www.twitter.com/psynister]@Psynister[/url] of [url=http://psynister.wordpress.com/]Psynister's Notebook[/url] said it best yesterday afternoon in this succinct tweet: [i]"If you pay for television or go to the theater, you're still paying money for pixels."[/i] We are here to spend money to be entertained. If you want real accomplishments, there is a whole world out there waiting for you to discover the next groundbreaking vaccine. No one cares that you have a [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/72808/bloodbathed-frostbrood-vanquisher/]Bloodbathed Frostwyrm Vanquisher[/url] in the meatspace world and no, you can't put it on your resume. We are all paying money for digital entertainment. Even the top teams in the world are paying to play Warcraft. I have no problem paying a little extra for some flair, though I do recognize it is flair and not accomplishment. Notice that there is no "Achievement: Star Pony" in the game. Others are leveraging a slippery slope argument regarding the use of the BlizzStore to sell epics. The policy thus far of Blizzard has been that they will not be selling epics, as in things that make your character better. The little XT/KT/Pandaren pets do not make your character better. Opportune moments where a buddy's XT pet shouts "Ahh, I BROKE IT!" that make me laugh in real life are not making my character better, they are making my warcraft experience more enjoyable. Anyone else notice these pets and doodads tend to come out between content patches? Now, instead of little companions we have the first mount being sold on the BlizzStore. For better or worse, after $2mil worth sold in 4 hours (thats 80,000 btw), it will not be the last, not by a long shot. However, it is a long shot away from [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50732/bloodsurge-kelthuzads-blade-of-agony/]Bloodsurge, Kel'Thuzad's Blade of Agony[/url] being sold on the BlizzStore. The mount only operates at the level of your current fastest mount. My mage's flies at 310% because I have earned a 310% mount on that character. The mount does not make my character better, it makes my character more flashy. Flashiness is the fundamental issue. I cannot help but channel my inner [url=http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com]Gevlon of Greedy Goblin[/url] and say the M&S/Socials are really the people who have a problem with this new mount. Standing around Dalaran on your new Star Pony makes you flashy and eye-catching. Not so much yesterday when there were about fifteen of us around the North Bank at any given time. However, the eye cannot help but look at flashy things. It works on fish, it works on people. The mount is extremely visible. Socials would say it is a huge sign that says, "Look, I can spend money on imaginary pixels". However, I think playing Warcraft at all is a huge sign that says "Hey, I can spend money on my entertainment". The Star Pony merely says I am more willing to allocate discretionary spending towards my (completely obsessive and invasive) hobby than your average WoW player. This is what the socials have a problem with. I am doing something they would not do (going against the norm) and paying for flashiness (getting something they value for it). Before yesterday, flashiness really only came from two places: completing raids or getting extremely lucky in the WoW:TCG card pack lottery. As someone who does not enjoy looking like an idiot shelling out several hundred dollars on a card game played by 12-year olds, I appreciate that flashiness now comes from three places: Raiding, TCG, and the BlizzStore. Many, many people bought their spectral tigers, rocket mounts, or that crazy flamingo chicken mount off Ebay. Is buying a flashy mount like the Spectral Tiger off Ebay any different than Blizzard cutting out the comic book/card store middlemen, who jack up the prices of these "imaginary pixels" to well over a grand, and selling it themselves directly to their loyal customers? I submit that Blizzard is doing us, the players who are interested in these flavor items, a favor by offering them for a reasonable price in the BlizzStore. If the mount had come from the TCG, it would have been over $1,000 and well out of reach for all but the most extremely lucky or extremely rich. The comic book shop guys (and ebay pre-scratched code scammers) would have rejoiced at having yet another little cardboard card be worth several months car payments for a crazy imaginary horse. However, since Blizzard is selling it directly for a reasonable price, it just makes me smile at the joy my wife gets out of flying around on it. So, I for one welcome our new RMT overlords. The next item is going to have to be better than the Star Pony since the pony is the new benchmark for "items I'm willing to shell out extra WoW funds for". I welcome the next game that involves micro-transactions and the next shiny distraction away from the fact that we are in a nine month gap between real content (end of WotLK, start of Cataclysm). The Lich King is dead for me. What else do I have to do besides collect achievements and crazy imaginary pixel mounts? I welcome comments on this particular subject, especially if you are one of the silent chunk of players who are willing to shell out cash for items in game.

After being inspired by Cynwise's expert work with posts like [url=http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/fight-at-the-flag/]"Fight at the Flag"[/url], I realized there is a hole in the public battleground information that needs to be filled. I will attempt to fill that hole by outlining some general strategy for Arathi Basin. I am sure that a quick google search will reveal that many others have attempted to do this same exercise, but I believe that doing so will aid my fellow Horde in conquering the Basin and perhaps carve a few more notches in my gun .. err, wand. So, we will begin at the very basics and hopefully by the end, some enlightenment will have been gleaned from these pictures and helpful descriptors. First, we must analyze the field as a whole in order to wrap our minds around the chaotic environment in which we are about to plunge. The goal of Arathi Basin is to take nodes which give points over time for being held by one team or the other. I feel the need to repeat this many, many times when I am in the Basin, but here I will let my kind readers let that sink in on their own. There are five nodes in Arathi Basin available for capture. Your goal is to hold at least three of them for a majority of the engagement. There is a disparity of points allocated towards teams with more than three flags. Holding four flags is worth twice as many points as holding three flags (1.7 points/sec [pps] vs 3.3 pps). Needless to say, holding five flags is worth 20 times more than holding three flags (30 pps vs 1.7 pps). If the game is in a defensive tie (3-2), the winning team is gaining 0.6 pps over the losing team. This means that holding four flags for one minute is worth more than holding three flags for three minutes. I interpret this scoring differential to mean one thing: he who dares, wins ("qui audet adipiscitur"). That is not to say, however, that holding four flags should be your goal, it is not. Less dying and more defensive play at the beginning will keep the initiative for your team. Your first job is to gauge the strength of your opposition and look for opportunities to steal a flag that your opponent is not adequately defending. You want to twist the map, taking advantage of the pathing and opportunistic choke points to make their reinforcements and defensive line be at the same point. You want to leverage your full team against their full team while you have the score differential on your side. In a majority of AB engagements, you will find your opponents to be equal to your strength. They have the same number of bots, afk'ers, 2700 GS tards, and road warriors as you do. Your team will suck at communicating. So will theirs. Your team will be slow to call incomings and slow to respond, so will theirs. Eventually, the smart players will see a hole in the enemy's defensive line and burst through it like Emmitt Smith in the 1994 Super Bowl. The winners will be the people who accept these weaknesses and play to their strengths using communication, good teamwork, and a bit of strategy. [i]* Aside: I will be referring to nodes by their abbreviations throughout this post. So, as a quick note: BS = Blacksmith, FR = Farm, GM = Goldmine, LM = Lumbermill, ST = Stables, AGY = Alliance Start Graveyard, HGY = Horde Start Graveyard. Learn these, they will help you communicate quickly. [/i] [i]* Second aside: A common saying in American baseball states (paraphrasing) "You're gonna win 54 games and lose 54 games, it's what you do with the other 54 games that determines how good your team is", these strategies will not work in every single match. You are going to get lots of bad players and lots of good players, it's what you do with the games that are on tilt with even match ups where these techniques will help.[/i] [b]Defensive Triangles[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/defensive-triangles.gif[/img] You will notice, after careful examination, that while the flags are all relatively equidistant to one another, there are really only five paths between Trollbane Hall (Alliance Start Point) and Defiler's Den (Horde Start Point). Across the center square, BS, there are two roads which connect from specific paths which creates a situation where fast defensive reactions can only happen from certain positions. Using these paths to your team's advantage requires capturing flags that support each other's defense (FR/LM/BS vs ST/GM/BS) and allow you to collect spare defenders in the flat where the three flag approaches connect for fast reactions to incoming attackers. All strategies in AB rely on this bulwark of defense to leverage wins. Every strategy I will outline covers going into, attaining, and attacking out of your defensive triangle. Your #1 goal in AB is to keep that triangle strong. However, there are some inequities of starting disposition which adversely affect the Alliance triangle. I hate to say this, but Arathi Basin is a Horde map. The disparities of position are almost all Horde aligned. The BS access ramp is near our defensive flag (FR). The BS access ramp is near LM (the second best node), allowing LM defenders to watch all three flags simultaneously and call incomings from relative immunity not to, mention parachute cloak/levitate/slow fall allows LM defenders to become BS defenders in five to seven seconds. The BS flag is on our side of the BS island. Our defensive flag (FR) is away from the enemies main artery of attack (from GM), their defensive flag (ST) is towards our main artery of attack (LM). The distance between ST and GM flags is gigantic (almost 30 seconds), whereas the same defensive line between FR and LM is almost half that length. The only advantage Alliance seems to possess is their starting node (ST) is about four seconds closer to AGY than FR is to HGY. Alliance will start every game with a four second lead (3.2 points) that Horde must overcome to win. The lines of defense are much tighter on the Horde side of the map and I considered writing a strategy for alliance that said "just follow the Horde strategy, accept that you start every match on the wrong side of the map". Instead, I will rely on Alliance generals (like Cynwise) to correct/enlighten me as to alliance benefits, if there are any. [b]Strategy Signatures[/b] When you look at a picture of the Arathi Basin map during the middle of a game, it has a certain signature. If you could pretend, for a moment, that you knew exactly where the enemy was positioned and you already know where your troops are (on the road, battling one druid running away), then you can take a snapshot of that moment and analyze it to see what needs to be done to win the game. Arathi Basin is a great place for doing this, since the positions are static and the tactics pretty standard. Much like Chess, Arathi Basin starts out sublime and simple, three or four moves are the most popular and almost everyone uses them. However, what separates [url=http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?pid=52948&playercomp=black&opening=B34-B39+B70-B79&title=Magnus%20Carlsen%20playing%20the%20Sicilian%20Dragon%20as%20Black]Magnus Carlsen's Sicilian Dragon[/url] opening from the Black and my inept play of "flail until you lose", is [url=http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/simple-battleground-strategies/]execution[/url]. As Cynwise so succinctly put it, "Execution > Strategy". However, I posit a corollary to this is "Strategy > No Strategy". So, I will now outline some basic strategies, starting with the most common. (Finally!) [i]* Last aside, I promise: I outline almost all of these strategies from the Horde prospective, you can just as easily flip them around for the Alliance prospective with some thinking. [/i] [b]3/2 Standard Opening[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/3-2-Standard-Horde.gif[/img] This is the common opening in 90% of the games I have played on Nightfall. Horde opens with 771: 7 to BS, 7 to LM, 1 roamer who tags FR and heads towards GM to prevent "Farmer's Gambit". Alliance opens with 555: 5 to LM, 5 to BS, 5 to GM. As a result, they lose the battles at LM and BS due to Horde having 1-3 more bodies at both nodes. So long as the FR roamer does his best not to die, they have a good vantage point of where the Alliance is currently deployed. This ends up with Horde controlling LM, BS, and FR (their defensive triangle). Alliance controlling ST and GM while wondering why they suck so much. The fallacy of this opening, though it is most common, is that the Alliance never decide what flags they are going after. They see a lot of people going after GM, a lot more going after BS, and the rest going after LM. All three opening nodes are covered, right? Wrong. They have split their team and are not wisely deploying resources to the field. Countering this style of play happens in two ways: veterans hang back at the start of AB and head where their extra weight will guarantee a node win knowing that Horde rarely assault GM with more than 1 (and relying on the 1-2 going to GM for alliance to win that battle) or the team agrees on which nodes they are taking (ST, GM and BS are the best) before the game starts. Once established, the Horde now have the initiative and can work on attaining a 4/1 Pin (see "Attacking out of the Triangle") against the GM when Alliance respawn permits. Once the game is put into this posture, it becomes increasingly hard for the Alliance to move the Horde out of their defensive triangle, especially if none of the Horde attack ST before GM. However, there are two weaknesses while the flags are being captured that the Alliance can take advantage of here: both AGY and HGY are the only active graveyards and AGY is closer to LM than HGY and the Horde rarely guards FR with more than one person (if at all). [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/3-2-Counterattack-Horde.gif[/img] The first counterattack, which happens while respawn has not yet occurred, is the GM flag team moving on FR and killing the defenders there to easily take the FR flag. The Alliance respawn moves en masse to LM. Their numbers should be around nine considering the two failed attack thrusts and should easily overrun LM's defenders even if all seven Horde stayed there to guard (highly unlikely). These two attacks rely on the respawn coordinating while dead on their targets and relaying this information to their colleagues at GM. This also relies on the Horde assuming a "hold 3" defensive posture and sitting in their triangle. The Horde commonly sit in a "hold 3" at this point, as they have (presumably) fought hard for the BS and the LM and two-thirds of their team is also resurrecting at HGY. Resurrecting Horde will flood FR, where the GM team will try to delay them as long as possible before dying and respawning, ironically enough, at GM to defend. These captures will push the game towards a 3/2 non-Triangle (alliance) signature where Alliance must find a way to trade LM for BS. Possible reaction variants of this include: - Horde BS capture team moving on ST, which results in a slower Alliance attack on LM as AGY respawns retake ST. After which, the Alliance ST team should move on BS instead of LM to establish the Alliance Triangle. - 4/1 Farmer's Gambit (Alliance) signature, which is covered later. - 4/1 Horde Triangle + GM, which is also covered later. [b]Tactical Standoff[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/tactical-standoff.gif[/img] Sometimes both teams are so equal that they open the match with good planning and simple directions. Both teams deploy 771 to their strongpoints in the triangle and the battle for the BS determines the outcome of the opening round. The key to this matchup is winning the BS and winning it decisively. This is where the Horde have an advantage. LM has a sightline to BS at the flag and GM does not. Once the Horde arrives at LM's flag, they can see a protracted battle occurring at BS and those with parachutes/slow fall/levitate/safe fall can jump into the battle at the BS flag within 5-10 seconds, swinging the opening battle their way and establishing an early triangle. [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/tactical-standoff-counterattack.gif[/img] Once this is done, the rest of the Horde LM team can storm undefended ST and pin the Alliance respawns at AGY back into their gate while the BS team can split to defend Farm while 1-2 of them take GM. Alliance counterattacks consist of GM team taking FR and trading FR for ST eventually and the resurrecting Alliance at AGY winning their battle with Horde's LM team to re-establish control of ST and make another move on BS. Lots of trades need to take place once the Horde have their triangle and are on this type of offense. Alliance should be looking to trade FR for GM and LM for ST or vice versa. Establishing a triangle will slow the pace of the game down, almost a reset if it happens fast enough, and there are lots of opportunities while the Horde is spread across five nodes to take what you need with seven dedicated people knowing where to go. The key to the tactical standoff is engaging in decisive battles, win or lose. If you lose fast enough, all your dead players res on the same timer and can come out as a rampaging gang ready to take any node you need (which is BS in this case). Winning fast enough opens the opportunity for a quick 5-cap that keeps the opposing team inside their starting graveyard and the game is over in under a minute. [b]Farmer's Gambit[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/Farmers-Gambit.gif[/img] The second most common opening attack in the Nightfall BG and the one which most often results in Alliance victories is "Farmer's Gambit". Basically the Alliance runs a 951 strategy that deploys nine against the Horde's seven, winning BS. A lone Alliance hits GM, capping the flag and sticking around to defend against errant rogues and druids. The remaining five slide along the road beside BS straight to FR which causes them to arrive in the Horde's backfield 10-15 seconds earlier than the Horde anticipate them being there, causing a quick 4/1 since the FR flag does not even have time to go Horde before being flipped. There is also an opportunity to pin the Horde in HGY if the BS team can successfully split between LM and FR resulting in an LM capture. In order for the Horde to continue the game once this has occurred, they must win both the battle at LM, keeping their presence there and the battle for FR with their respawns. This is hard to do once the Alliance have had time to get their BS assault team split correctly since no reinforcements will be coming to help the LM defenders throw off overwhelming Alliance numbers. [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/farmers-gambit-counterattack.gif[/img] [i]*Advanced Strategy*[/i] : Why doesn't the Alliance do this every time? Because it is highly visible. The Alliance running down the road by BS are clearly visible the entire trip and can be noticed by the FR roamer. Once Alliance are spotted by the roamer, the BS crew should break off their attack and cede the central node to the alliance while 1-2 of them split to take ST while the rest reinforce FR. Coordination is the key to turning this battle around. Winning the defense of FR turns the map into 3/2 Non-Triangle (Horde) with a really heavy battle at Horde Crossroads (center of their normal triangle). At some point in the near future, Horde should look to trade ST for BS to take advantage of differential in resurrection vectors with dying Alliance returning to AGY while dying Horde go to the much closer HGY. This resurrection vector differential allows Horde to press the attack on BS during a transition (remember I said FR flag was closer to BS?). Possible reactions to this variant: - Non-Triangle Situation (covered next) where the Horde lose the battle for FR anyways and must recover minus two of their triangle nodes. - 3/2 Standard Opening (Alliance) with a well established Alliance Triangle due to a catastrophic loss at the BS by Horde who failed to divert. Horde have little to no chance to counterattack due to overcommitting to a failed assault on BS. - 4/1 Farmer's Gambit Pin where Horde are left with only LM and Alliance runs them over with the 10 from BS who kill LM while the rest get pinned back in HGY. (Horde Loss) [b]Non-Triangle Situation[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/Horde_trades_stables.gif[/img] Alternately, the non-triangle situation occurs when forces are relatively balanced, are working hard to avoid committing to battles they cannot win, and are playing conservatively. Horde have opened with 771, Alliance have opened with 951, taking BS and Horde have reacted appropriately to take ST. Unfortunately, Horde lost their defense of FR and must now recover. Horde respawn from HGY paired with the LM team (minus one defender) should assault FR, LM team should feel free to butcher any Alliance they encounter along the road on the way since they left only one defender at LM and the Alliance BS team will be gunning in that direction. This may result in a huge battle at the Horde triangle centerpoint, but the Horde respawn is 15 seconds closer and will generally win a protracted battle at that location. (This is the only permissible time to be fighting on the road, btw.) ST Horde team should now attempt to take BS, leaving no defenders, since the BS Alliance team will be attempting to steamroll through LM and possibly FR. This should trade ST for BS, and FR should be taken out right, establishing a Horde Triangle. If undisciplined Horde move past ST to camp the AGY gate, they are not working to capture a flag, the Horde is in a vulnerable position to an Alliance trade for Triangle, and this will lose the map. The only time the AGY gate should be camped is in a 4/1 Pin position where all of the nodes south of ST are in Horde control and the defensive line has moved to the ST flag. [b]Attacking into an established Triangle[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/attacking-into-the-triangle.gif[/img] If Horde are allowed a 3/2 Standard opening and have had time to reinforce their position, then there is only one real option: assault the BS and establish an Alliance Triangle. Since Alliance are now losing, they can afford to take on more risk and should crash BS with 10-12 people (GM Gambit) intending to capture the flag and roll 6-8 right through it towards FR within 3-5 GCD's. Rolling towards FR instead of LM allows dead attackers to become live defenders at the point of counterattack. Fighting a protracted battle at any node gives the advantage to the defenders. A long battle at BS will allow the Horde to reinforce their position and will result in a failed assault, padding their points lead. If the assault does not roll the Horde quickly, those not committed to the battle should push LM hoping to draw defenders out of position while reinforcements spawn at ST. At this point, a failed assault on BS will result in a 300+ point advantage for Horde, which is almost insurmountable once they have established a defensive posture that quickly responds to incoming. Alternately, a second assault using 7 to LM, 7 to BS could occur, hoping to draw a disproportionate Horde response due to multiple incoming alerts. One team will get crushed, probably BS, while the other will take the node, probably LM. Trading LM for BS will result in an Alliance Triangle and can push the game back in their favor. The downfall of this assault versus the BS crash is it is slower, you can lose both assaults due to proportionate response, the LM strike team is not in a position to react to a call to defend GM, and your resurrection point is now at risk. [b]Attacking from a the Defensive Triangle[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/attacking-from-the-triangle.gif[/img] Once Horde has established their triangle, there are opportunities to attack amidst the storm of Alliance onslaught. The windows of opportunity occur when a decisive battle is won quickly and with minimal losses. Defending BS against an onslaught can be leveraged into a GM capture by shedding all but three defenders at each node and pushing six offensively into GM, going for the 4/1 Pin against ST/AGY. During this time, Alliance will be attacking a node, all but one defender should respond to the incoming alerts. In the event of multiple incoming alerts, GM attack team should abort towards FR, with the remaining defenders responding to the secondary alert. The attack occurs on the secondary node instead of the primary defensive node (GM in this case) because splitting the Alliance's team by causing an incoming alert pushes the defensive line back to ST. If the assault on ST occurs, the defensive front for Horde is split in two, with enemies able to assault FR, BS and ST from GM, and ST and LM from AGY. This means you have two groups trying to capture graveyards while defending all five flags. It is impossible with only 15 personnel to accomplish this task, resulting in a lost opportunity to pin the Alliance in ST/AGY. [b]4/1 Pin[/b] [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/arathi-basin-strategy/4-1-pin.gif[/img] For demonstration purposes, this is the 4/1 Pin (Horde) position where all of the nodes south of ST are captured and the Horde has leveraged their entire team against Stables, resulting in a protracted battle between ST and AGY. In almost every case, the Alliance has lost this game and frequently this results in a 5-cap Horde Victory. [b]Conclusion[/b] In almost every game, the dynamics of combat and the tactical deployments are fluid. People are fighting on the road and flags are being flipped by errant rogues and druids causing trouble. Frequently, no one is listening to Cynwise's advice to Fight at the Flag and everyone is arguing about who sucks more on this particular day. However, with a little bit of insight and understanding as to the pressures which cause AB flags to change color, you alone can shift the battle to victory for your side (hopefully Horde). These are my strategies, developed from my own observations and after lots and lots of Arathi Basin from both sides of the map. I am by no means a strategic genius. If you spot a hole in my strategy, please feel free to outline it in comments and I will respond and update this post when appropriate. Good luck and good hunting.

I recently dusted off the mage and started throwing multicolored globs of whatever arcane burst is at mobs for a living. After only a week of trolling my fellow bloggers' sites, [url=http://www.isheepthings.com/blog/sick-guild-kelthuzad/]Audron of isheepthings.com[/url] pointed me in the direction of a good guild he had heard about that was operating on my home server of Deathwing: [url=http://www.descendantsofdraenor.com]Descendants of Draenor[/url]. To be honest, DoD had flown under my radar. Often while searching for new guilds on the server, I had passed over their name simply because I did not know anything about them. DoD is highly insular, mature, and has an extreme planning horizon compared to almost every other guild on the server. Only twenty-four hours into my time with Descendants of Draenor, I had a pretty strong feeling this was not just another raiding guild on Deathwing. The guild motto is "if we don't die, we win", and I think that is reflected in how the guild operates. The traits that best demonstrate this mental toughness are obvious to an outside observer. First, DoD has a firm guild structure laid out in the [url=http://forums.descendantsofdraenor.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=16]public section of the forums[/url] where expectations, rewards, and responsibilities are laid out for anyone to take a look at. Everyone is invited to join and have fun to their desired level of participation. New recruits are required to engage the guild by signing into the game, vent, and the forums. Officers are watching recruits for warning signs such as antisocial behavior, Warcraft ignorance, or guild asset theft. This dating period is present in almost every other guild, but where it differs from every other guild is how much members of the guild have bought into the system as a whole. Few and far between are the curse filled rants of shallow, self-centered children extracting an ounce of pain from everyone unfortunate enough to be sharing a guild tag with them. As Hanzo [url=http://forums.descendantsofdraenor.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=12170]unabashedly brags on one of the forums posts[/url], DoD is "the most stable and reliable Horde guild on the server" and he is right. The DoD planning horizon is near infinite compared to your average Warcraft guild. After your initiation period, if you have demonstrated yourself to be at least adequate at operating your character, that you are not some crazy anti-social nutbag bent on abusing everyone around you, and you are not a guild vault thief, you will be promoted to "Guildy". Though I have not yet made it, I have a firm belief that when it is time, I will get promoted. Beyond that are Raider and Elite, the two raiding based ranks in the guild that have their own attendance criteria and benefits. Avatar is a special rank for recognizing who is the up-and-coming star in the Guildy/Raider ranks and to reward their hard work with status within the guild. Another special role, Old God, is given to ex-officers and extreme long term DoD members that the guild recognizes as being core to their history and future. Guild leadership is composed of Role Officer, Diplomat, and Guild Leader ranks which are all personalities that have been in the guild over two years (and in some cases 6!) that are trusted to look after the wellbeing of DoD before themselves. From the moment you join, if you are so inclined, there is two years of guidance on how to become a successful, well regarded member of DoD. No bullshit, no infighting, no cliques. Every member has bought into DoD Leadership's system from top to bottom with few exceptions and it is easy to see why. Within twenty-four hours of my signing on to DoD's roster, I had two separate conversations with Hanzo, DoD's Guild Leader, concerning how he runs the guild and any apprehensions I might have concerning my transition into their system. It has been a long time since I felt this in touch with guild leadership that I was not running. This level of granular control goes beyond guild chat and into vent as well. Ventrilo channels are labelled based on their level of tolerated explicit conversation (with a majority being explicit) and use of Vent is preferred over guild chat. People with families know which channels they can safely hang out in and those of us with a foul mouth and wicked tongue have been warned when we enter a non-explicit room. In all ways, Hanzo and his team have tried to instill the fact that you are hanging out with other human beings, not just purple pixel wearing animatronic robots built to provide you with even more purple pixels. Speaking of purple pixels, the raiding schedule is nuts: 8 hours/week, not a minute more. I know, crazy, right? Wrong. The main raiding team has been fighting the Lich King (25) for three weeks now. In no other guild, counting my world top10 kills with the Guardians, have I ever heard a more laid back and fun raid chat while working on what has amounted to twelve straight hours of wiping on LK. Conversations and arguments concerning the difference between watts and hertz? Check. Bad singing and crazy talk about anime characters? Check. When things get a little out of hand, off color, or crazy, one of the officers steps in and cools down the conversation. All without much detriment to our continual progress towards defeating the Lich King. Though he has not been killed yet, it is clear that he will die on our next meeting, Easter reprieve or no. Outside of the main 25-man raid body, DoD has set up raiding teams that operate like autonomous raiding bodies ran by their leaders in any way the group sees fit. With names like "Team Starflex", "Team Cowbell" and "Team Si" they have progressed through ICC10 independently, resulting in three teams killing LK within the first few weeks of him becoming available. A section of the forums is dedicated to the planning and organization required to operate these teams and a good amount of recruiting seems to go on for the higher skill players with the experience to help put their team ahead. One could easily say that Descendants of Draenor is a guild houses are at least [b]nine weekly raiding teams[/b] operating at various levels within the guild. Yes, nine. Oh, and a 25-man alt run that happens on Saturday lead by the very capable Mangetsu (who gives me 95%+ uptime on Focus Magic, tyvm). Did I mention this guild is huge? Descendants of Draenor is huge. 366 characters at the time of this writing and very few days go by that I do not see Hanzo pull in another recruit from his mysterious black bag of free agents. The structure and the discipline seems not only necessary but obvious once you put that number into perspective. Looking at a few new people a week, that is a lot of personalities to digest and help along the road to Guildy. If even a third of those characters are active, that's over 100 people that need all the constant babysitting, ego stroking, and maintenance that your average WoW player requires. Except they don't. In any other guild, without six years of tradition and the dedication that DoD officers have towards their guild, this would be an unwieldy mess. However, through some minor miracle, the community has fully bought into DoD leadership's vision that mature individual can play Warcraft at a challenging level without being months behind. .. and that is what DoD is. A group of mature, community oriented individuals killing internet dragons at a competitive pace without losing sight of the things that matter: the journey, the people on the other side of the screen, and what happens outside of the World of Warcraft. Hanzo is completely right to boast that his guild is the most stable guild on Deathwing Horde. I would put money down against 99.9% of other guilds in this game that he is right. I have definitely bought in, but for the first time in a long time, I am not worried about getting my pay out. Expect to hear more about how this goes, because I have a feeling I am just getting started here.

For the past few years, I have increasingly decided to disable trade chat on my various servers and characters. While the people I choose to interact with on a daily basis, especially since joining the Descendants of Draenor on Deathwing, has enriched my game life, the quality of discourse going on within trade chat has diminished. Increasingly, /2 is filled with language I choose to call "offensive, racist trash" (ORT). Throwing a dart at a board filled with racist pejoratives, you are likely to hit a word used every ten to fifteen seconds in Deathwing Horde trade. The more that board is filled with anti-black, anti-gay or anti-semitic language, the more often your dart will find the veritable top-10 language of the racist teenagers. Given the pure number of ORT comments and the number of ORT participants, the job of policing the chat seems untenable. I posit that people have already invented ways to solve this problem. Blizzard, in it's infinite wisdom, has come to a happy neutral on the subject: crowd sourcing. Quoting Syndri from a [url=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23766797085&sid=1&pageNo=1]recent thread on the subject[/url]: [quote]"That said, if you see anyone engaging in inappropriate chat or any other behavior you feel is unacceptable for the game, please do submit an in-game petition or send an email to wowgm@blizzard.com and explain the situation. Be sure to include the name and realm of the offending character and the receiving Game Master will be happy to investigate the issue and take all appropriate actions. "[/quote] Like [url=http://earthsky.org/human-world/riley-crane-wins-pentagons-red-balloon-computer-science-challenge]Riley Crane[/url], Blizzard has turned to us to solve the problem for them. The relative tolerances of each server dictate the quality of it's behavior and I honestly believe it is a good idea. However, we, the people who believe ORT has no place in WoW or any public conversation, are dropping the ball. The old system of reporting these solutions was unacceptable. Using the red "?" to report every racist remark in trade would require updating your ticket every 10-15 seconds for the four days it takes to make it through the petition system. However, Blizzard has armed us with another avenue of attack: [url=mailto:wowgm@blizzard.com]wowgm@blizzard.com[/url]. Dropping a line to that mail box containing your server name, the offenders name, a quick copy of their text, and your name results in two emails being sent back to you. One is an automated email saying they got your message, the second is a response from a named GM (Zynicah in my case) who will deal with the ORT offender on your behalf. After a few days of watching trade chat, I started to see the same names popping up over and over again. A few emails have been sent with their logs over the past days. Apparently Blizzard sees the same thing: [quote]Also, if your realm is true to form to most, I suspect there are actually not all that many players involved. Things like this tend to revolve around literally a handful of players. Others may jump on a bandwagon, but if the chronic offenders are removed you'll most likely see things improve rather quickly. [/quote] A lot of discussion has taken place around my circle of friends regarding the merits of freedom of speech, complete freedom of speech, and the tolerances that should be made for hate-speech. I believe pretty strongly in freedom of speech, I think that the government has no place in deciding which ideas can be expressed and where. I think that government enforced prohibition of "hate-speech" is liberal hogwash built to keep minorities separated from the population at large. I believe this because I think it is our job to police what we find acceptable and unacceptable speech in our community. Each community of individuals decides, either consciously or unconsciously, what they will tolerate and that sociological pressure is exerted on anyone operating inside that community. Remember: [b]"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -Ayn Rand.[/b] So, if you are enjoying the benefits of a ridicule and racist filled trade chat on your server, carry on. If you are one of the ORT contributors and you get an email from Blizzard warning you about your conduct, please reconsider your chosen affiliations. If you are also on Deathwing, feel free to send me a hate tell since I probably reported you and we can have a decent debate over freedom of speech. However, if you, like me, realize that you have been subconsciously avoiding trade chat for years, please follow the directions below. 0) Make sure you understand the [url=http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20226#racialethnic]Chat Harrassment Policy[/url] and that it does not include voluntary/private channels like guild chat or any custom channels you have joined. 1) Get an addon like [url=http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/prat-3-0.aspx]Prat[/url] that lets you copy text out of your chat box. 2) Enable timestamps (via chatbox tab), it will make the GM's job easier. 3) Fill out this form and send it to [url=mailto:wowgm@blizzard.com]wowgm@blizzard.com[/url]. [b]** Do not edit the logs, I did because I posted this on the internet and do not want the traffic that comes from having six letter words for black people in my searchable text.[/b] Form: Greetings Blizzard Employee, I would like to report offensive or racist remarks made in a public channel on [your server] [your faction] that I believe run contrary to Blizzard's Chat Harrassment Policy. Copied below is the lines of the log from the conversation. Thank you for helping me rid my server of offensive, racist trash. - player of on Chat is reported in my local time [Server Time +- #] [09:14:22] [2. Trade] [80:SomeAsshole]: lol dude really you gotta throw that in their see ignorant ppl like you cant handle a professional conversation so that makes you the (six letter word for black people) [09:14:56] [2. Trade] [SomeOtherAsshole]: masonic programing in rap makes blacks into (six letter N-word for black people) not all black people are (six letter N-word for black people) [09:15:46] [2. Trade] [YetAnotherAsshole]: they're (six letter word for black people) why do we have to give a (bowel movement) about them being lazy and not working for a decent house? [09:16:36] [2. Trade] [80:SomeAsshole]: he i know sum lazzy ass (seven letter word for persons of southern descent) also tell them to stop fucking their daughters and do sumthign with their lives

Talents should be your toolbox, not your tool belt, for being your character. Your tool belt has your screwdriver and your hammer and you use those every day, all the time. Your tool box has your lathe and your jigsaw for when you want to work with wood, but it also has your Bosch CB706 Cement Circular Saw Blade for when you are working on other projects. Your toolbox has a lot of tools in it, no project is ever going to require every single one of them. Occasionally you need to borrow a tool from a buddy who specializes in woodcarving to get the job done, just like he occasionally requires your expertise in framing on certain projects. This is what talent is: knowing something that makes you unique and sometimes necessary. Talents should provide capabilities that do not come at the cost of doing your job, whatever that is. Tank talents should not lower survivability, DPS talents should not lower DPS, healing talents should not lower healing prowess. Every tanking tree should have a ranged taunt component in it that costs points. MT's will not use it, OT's will love it. Every DPS tree should have AoE and Single Target talents available for purchase. Every healing tree should have the same AoE and Single Target talents available. Improved Blizzard is a good example of this: a talent that just adds a great capability to a spell, but is not necessary for every situation. Additionally, every class should have unique talents that do not apply to the Tank/Healer/DPS triangle that makes them do something rare or unique. Rogues have lockpicking (and mages once did), Warlocks have summoning, Hunters have tracking, Mages have vending machines, Priests have mind control, Shamen/DK's have water walking, many classes have water breathing. These are non-combat (yet frequently combat applicable) talents that should be talents. Though I am still waiting for the underwater dungeon given the prevalence of underwater breathing apparatuses, classes with underwater breathing, and the everyone is undead breath timer. (Right after Engineers get personal submarines, please.) Talents that diversify class defining abilities into more than one stop shops for more damage versus utility should be the order of the day in Cataclysm. Glyphs are the perfect place for tradeoffs and the +1% damage talents. I consider glyph of fireball to be the perfect glyph: I am trading damage over time for potential damage up front. The math on the glyph is easy to calculate and that should make it easy to balance so that it is a true choice of rotations and situations, not just more dps. If someone PvP's a lot, they should want to keep fireball like it is, the dot talent is useful while they cry themselves to sleep for being a fire mage in PvP right now. However, a raider could care less about the fireball dot unless some combo enables him to use that debuff productively for more damage throughput or mana efficiency. This is a choice which when balanced properly is a game play decision and not a make or break dps-for-more-dps' sake decision. Glyph of Frostbolt on the other hand... are there still frosty raiders?

Quick update: RSS is fixed again, I'm not sure what went wrong, but it is working now and should continue to *fingers crossed*. =) Recently, I switched back to raiding as a full time arcanist. That is an arcane mage, for you non-mage folks. See, every mage tree has it's own special label and you can no longer refer to yourself as just a mage once you spec into say fire (pyromancer) or frost (hydromancer). When I join a group and someone asks what spec I am, if I reply "frost mage", you can tell who the other mage-alts are because I will be corrected. There are [url=http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=5383590424&sid=1]entire threads[/url] dedicated to naming what type of mage you are, regardless of the fact that they all basically throw the same three spells. However, I am digressing from my point. I am raiding full time as an arcanist. Returning to the back of the class has given me a new perspective on WotLK raiding. I don't want to say that it is a fresh one. I have raided as a mage before (TBC) and a hunter before that, so I cut my teeth in the back of the team throwing spit wads at bosses. Mostly, I get to watch what everyone else is doing. As a raid leader for several years, admittedly not since WotLK dropped, I think I have a pretty good eye for looking at raids and seeing how everything is working together. This also includes seeing what is not quite working so well. Right now, I would have to say I am probably one of the weak links in the raiding group. I am under geared for the adventures in ICC25 (5289 GS) and definitely under geared compared to my contemporaries. Two trips through ICC so far and I have only died twice in non-wipe situations, I feel like while I have a handle on the mechanics. However, my dps is just not up to par. An example from Professor Putricide: [img]http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/brokensword-dps-professor-putricide.gif[/img] As you can see, I am pretty good at dodging damage, taking only about 1k dps incoming the entire battle with the exception of a neighbor getting wacked by a malleable goo at 21:44. Putricide is a fairly controlled encounter with few mechanics for ranged to really worry about besides target swapping to kill ooze. I picked it up fast and while this was my first fight against him ever, I felt I did my job: contributed dps without needing much healing. My DPS is pretty terrible, but that is changing. Conversely, lets look at a fight where I am basically dead weight: Sindragosa. A quick Sindragosa strategy recap for my fabulous readers who have not fought Arthas' mount yet. Sindragosa is a three-phase classic dragon battle that starts with her landing and has a few flying phases. Phase 1 she's on the ground and occasionally vacuums the entire raid into her then starts casting some mega-bomb frost PBAoE for you to run away from until it is over. This is pretty easy for mages since we just blink back to our position and start dropping bombs again. A second ability, Magical Backlash, is cast on single raiders that causes damage when you cast spells doing damage to Sind. Phase 2 is a flying phase where she targets five players to become ice blocks and everyone gets to hide behind the blocks while four frost bombs go off on the other side. The key to phase two is making sure no two ice blocks are within eight yards of each other or they will explode and kill the occupants. Do this enough times and she lands for good (< 35% health), and the real fight starts. Sind will start stacking a new debuff, Mystic Buffet, causing progressing levels of magic damage on everyone in the raid. Controlling the debuff is the key to victory as you can hide behind the ice block to shed it, then go back to DPS'ing the boss. You can see from my graph that our phase 3 started around 23:42:30 and my DPS never came above 5k again. [img]http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/brokensword-dps-sindragosa.gif[/img] The graph looks like a mess. Metric shit-tons of spikes for both incoming (red) and outgoing damage (yellow). Metric shit-tons, mind you, not imperial, oh no. Imperial shit-tons would mean I'm actually carrying my end of the raiding bargain instead of being a giant damage sponge (which, I should remind you, mages are not built to be). I'm eating around 3500 dps the entire fight and only some pretty heroic measures by our healers kept me up through the end. That Sindragosa snapshot is a wipe, which you can tell because the blue and red lines continue after the yellow one ends. As you can see, I have no trouble blowing my load during phase 1 when she's on the ground and being handled. Dodging the various elements is pretty easy for a ranged and the constant frost damage hits are doing wonders for my incanter's absorption based spell power bonuses. Get hit, my DPS spikes. Run to the stairs, stand behind an ice block, DPS drops. All in all, every time the yellow bar hits the x-axis, you can assume I am standing behind an ice block when I should be dps'ing that ice block. The spike just before 23:38 is me eating some magical backlash. A look at my fellow Descendant of Draenor, Setsero, who is an awesome mage: [img]http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/setsero-dps-sindragosa.gif[/img] Yes, this is also a wipe and yes, he's eating an imperial shit-ton of damage, but if you look at the outgoing damage spikes, you can see a great many of them are concurrent or slightly following behind an incoming damage spike. This is a signature for a mage attempting to leverage incanter's absorption against Sindragosa and it's paying off. 23:35:30, he absorbs ~17,000 damage, a few seconds later, his dps shoots up by ~12kdps. 35:39:00 he absorbs another 17k, his DPS shoots up above 17k for a few moments, meaning he's hitting for well in excess of 25k dmg per blast. The difference between Setsero's gear and mine is about 600 GS. He has 2T10, I don't. He has an ICC casting weapon, I don't. However, those differences should not account for *double* the dps output. So what have we learned? [b]That knowing the fight is the single best increase to personal dps available.[/b] Watching the videos and learning the strategies pays off when it comes time to have the metal hit the meat. It results in far less deaths, and far more dps. In this case, the payoff is four-fold: half the deaths, twice the DPS. So, a quick salute to you, Setsero, I have enjoyed shooting bolts of magic ooze with you so far and look forward to many more outings. Especially since only the Lich King remains. On a side note, I have recently joined a new guild, Descendants of Draenor, on the recommendation of my buddy Aurdon over at [url=http://www.isheepthings.com]iSheepThings.com[/url]. I cannot place enough emphasis on how awesome this guild is. However, that is for another post that will be coming out in a week. Until then, good hunting.

My quest for [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/battlemaster/]Battlemaster[/url] has begun again. Unfortunately, I have not restarted it on my death knight**. I have worked these last two weeks getting a mage (my TBC raiding character) from 70 to 80 and ready to hit the (battle)ground running. While not on the Battlemaster pre-requisites list, I have spent a great deal of the past four days in the Isle of Conquest farming honor off the poor alliance and just having a great time with my wife and her warlock. However, like all events Warcraft, a few things stand out to me concerning strategy in the Isle of Conquest. The most concerning point is the disparity of victory between the Horde and Alliance in this particular map. Over the past weekend, I have enjoyed about fifty games of IoC (29-21). About half of those were played with my wife's warlock and so perhaps the constant presence of my arena partner has skewed my views on this particular battleground, but I think these observations have more to do with overarching strategy than two casters burning down every poor wardering solo that we come across. The first idea is pretty much the simplest: [b]unless you are specifically defending a strategic point (that needs defending), you should always be moving towards the enemy's keep with something to kill a wall[/b]. Fundamentally, IoC is about destroying a gate. [url=http://forceinbalance.blogspot.com/2009/09/somethings-rotten.html]Ihrayeep has speculated that the map is Horde bias[/url] and while I would normally defer to his experience, I must comment that all the gates have the same hitpoints (600,000) and there is a good sniping spot for both the horde and the alliance on the west side and the hanger is gate neutral as you're dropping into the courtyard and have equal access to all three gates. Killing the enemy general is a reward for destroying the gate. Once the gate is down, unless your team is full of addle brained night elves, you will win the game in about a minute. Have no doubt my friends, the team that destroys the first gate wins the game ~95% of the time. Fortunately, there is an arsenal of gate destroying weapons spread out over the Isle that have varying levels of gate destroying potential if used correctly. First, we have the docks. I mention the docks first because they are pretty much the best node on the map if you intend to finish the game in about eight minutes and leave the opposing team wondering how the hell you did it. Properly used, the glaives put out around 1700 siege DPS (3400 with x2 glaives firing) and have the longest range of anything on the Isle. Their range is so long that when properly positioned, they are immune to the defenders rocket towers. However, like all things with great power, they are incredibly delicate with only 30kHP. This means retadins dropping a golden retriever on the keyboard can kill one before the bubble wears off if the team is not actively working to keep them safe. [b]What this really means is that you need five to eight defenders for each glaive.[/b] While 18 units dedicated to firing and defending glaives may seem like a lot, be assured that once both glaives are firing the gates will fall in about 5:48 minutes and this does not scale with gear level, so putting your weakest into the glaives is advisable. Defeating an opponent using the docks as their main avenue towards your base exposes their single point of failure: kill the glaives or lose the game. While generally capped by the Horde in the Nightfall BG, unlike every other node on the map, single handedly holding the Docks and defending the glaives will win you the game in the fastest possible way. [img]http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/isleofconquestmap-strategy.jpg[/img] Symmetrically opposing the docks is the hanger. The problem with the hanger which makes it less valuable than the docks is subtle, but manifold. First, you have to defend the hanger flag or the airship returns to base and leaves your paratroopers stranded inside the enemy base. Second, any enemies you kill in the first two minutes of the match will be re-spawning inside your LZ. Third, it requires a great deal of strategy and teamwork to properly coordinate a hanger victory with many moving parts and many single points of failure. Unlike the docks, if your defenders fail to hold the flag, you will lose. If the rest of the team does not concentrate on killing glaives, you will lose. If your paratroopers aren't up to snuff, they will get cut down before they can get to the bombs (and you will lose). If your team is anything like my teams, getting the prerequisite number of people (15) to hit the hanger simultaneously and properly defend/jump/bombard has about the same odds as winning the Pik-an-flik from Barkeep Morag's nose in Orgrimmar. For a proper Orcwaffe* conquering of the Isle, you need 15 people to jump into the airship and four to five left to defend the flag. Only ten need to make the actual jump, as the others should stay in the guns and bombard the little ants in the courtyard. You never know when a falling ball of pure liquid fire will do the 3500 damage needed to finish off a pesky healer (otherwise, they should be shooting the graveyard whenever it is in range). The reason you only need ten to jump is the rate in which huge seaforium bombs spawn: four per twenty seconds. This means you only need four dedicated bomb carriers and a group of six killing the alliance trying to defend. As stated previously, the rest of the group needs to realize you are using a hanger strategy and cap *both* refinery and quarry after killing those glaives. Capping both siege damage bonus nodes will take huge seaforium bomb DPS up to 1700 from 1300, matching the glaive dps. If you do not kill the glaives, you cannot win with just the hanger. It really is that simple. Lastly, there is the the workshop. If your battlegroup is anything like mine, the workshop is the site of the best grand melee battles available in Warcraft. No other place in the game so greatly encourages the 40 v 40 tactless zerg like a lone flag in the middle of a flood plain. Sure, AV has some good battles for the bridge or at the IBT chokepoint, but nothing compares to the huge field sitting around the workshop flag when both teams are filled with crazed berserkers who think strategy is targeting the red names and dropping a golden retriever on the keyboard. If I am not specifically farming an achievement, I will generally head straight at the workshop in the beginning of the game just to take part in the awesome battle that nets 25-30 HK's for my honor wallet. During the grand melee, a few things seem to always push the battle our way. First, I politely ask for Bloodlust about five seconds after the lines have crossed if it has not been used already since so rarely will the full power of this skill be brought to bear on the enemy outside of a raid. Second, while the alliance seem to still possess way, way more paladins than the horde, their paladins are all retardins who run directly into our lines, start hacking away, and bubble run back when their lifebar gets chopped up. Our shaman, conversely, seem to stand in the back and heal the hell out of our frontline warriors. As a mage, I pay special attention to helping our healers get out of rogue/warrior issues and everything seems to go just peachy. Once we have the flag, leveraging the demolishers is pretty cut and dry: charge the west gate of the alliance keep. I would call the workshop weaponry the potatoes side dish of the IoC dinner plate. It's nice to have, but will rarely win any games alone. Workshop's deficit comes from the fact that the siege engine does the same damage as a single glaive, has no range, and spawns two minutes after the workshop battle has been decided. The real advantage to owning the workshop is controlling the shortest path to the enemy stronghold across the field. Once secure, you can get your re-spawns back into the fight much faster via the graveyard in the middle of the map than the poor alliance spawning at the hanger. Once you have successfully leveraged the glaives or huge seaforium bombs to knock down a gate in about seven minutes, all of the defenders can conveniently pour right into the courtyard. You did have about fifteen people hanging around the glaives or deployed to the airship, right? Well that is more than enough to go stomp a mud hole in the spot where High Commander Halford Wyrmbane's testicles used to be and to do it quite fast. So, even if you are cursed with five afk'ers and another ten completely useless players in mixed quest rewards, you can still easily win IoC with 15 people working a concerted strategy to take down one target: a gate. Good luck and good hunting * "Orcwaffe" is a term coined by Ratshag, author of [url=http://needmorerage.blogspot.com/]Need More Rage[/url], for the Horde airborne. It is pretty much the best Orc blog ever written and should already be in your bookmarks. ** I have a confession to make: I have abandoned PvP on my DK. After many months of struggling to make him work, I have pretty much given up. As [url=http://criticalqq.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/pvp-an-expansion-in-ponderance-death-knights/]Euripedes has opined at great length[/url], the fundamental problem is damage. I feel like my job as a DK is to keep everyone snared and attempt to put diseases up. However, ultimately it is just too easy to shrug off diseases in this game, and thus the damage throughput of an Unholy DK is terribly neutered. It is hard enough to fight the crazy healing going on in this game with 8-10k dmg arcane blasts, but with even full powered scourge strikes doing only about half that much damage (when diseases are up), it is getting untenable to continue. Call me a social or a casual, but I feel that pvp is much more enjoyable as just about any other class.

Recently the developers queried the Tanks of WoW to discuss threat. One of my blogging compatriots, Gravity (of [url=http://www.pwnwear.com]pwnwear.com[/url] -- go read it if you haven't yet), [url=http://pwnwear.com/2010/02/27/is-threat-fun/ ]opined on the subject at great length[/url] with focuses on gearing and spec decisions. He also posted a helpful [url=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23425705299&sid=1&pageNo=1]starting thread[/url] on the official tanking forums, which unsurprisingly turned into a giant woe-is-me tanking whiner thread in about eight seconds. However, I think I can answer this question without quite so much verbosity: no, threat is not fun. It is artificial and seems like a clunky game mechanic to get around the fact that people can't even get out of the damned fire, not to mention a boss that actually might move around. Fundamentally, raiding is a group puzzle solving game with timing mechanics. If you're good at Dance Dance Revolution and can solve sudoku puzzles, you're probably overqualified to be a raider in Warcraft. The entire raiding scene can be summed up with: tank(s) hold the boss(es) in some spot, DPS shoots their magic missiles at the boss, healers heal the tanks (and occasionally bad DPS who can't play DDR). At around a third into the fight, everyone presses the green left arrow, then the right red arrow, then back back, forward forward, and everyone gets back into positions to start tanking/shooting missiles/healing scrubs. Repeat at 66% into the fight, dps hard the last 10%, oh we won. Collect purple pixels, yay, I'm awesome. Inside of this group puzzle solving game, everyone has a particular job and as the tank your job is to hold the boss in one spot and keep him focused solely on you. You do this by maintaining threat. Threat is really a misnomer since you would figure the threatening people are the ones actually killing the boss (or the ones healing the ones doing the killing), but this ability for the person who does the least damage, can take the most damage, and does very little else needs a name, so threat sounds great. Threat can be considered invisible damage (like what Ovechkin does instead of scoring goals) because it really is only there to give the tanks a way to keep the boss on them. The reason we know threat is artificial? Watch as many arena videos as you feel like sitting through and notice how many strategies revolve around killing the prot warrior/paladin first. Now consider how many involve picking on the guy wearing toilet paper and doing all the damage. Alright, I think we can move on.. The upside of threat, if you can consider it an upside, it that it is pretty easy to build as long as you know which three buttons to mash like a golden retriever just fell on your keyboard. Most every tanking class has a tanking buff (frost presence, def stance, righteous fury, being a druid) that drastically increases the threat you generate from seemingly innocuous moves. Ever considered what taunting really is? Every NPC enemy in the game is basically Joe Pesci from Goodfellas. I just shouted at a mob and now it wants to kill me and only me. [img]http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/goodfellas.jpg[/img] Another key problem with threat as it is now is that once you have established yourself as the primary recipient of the mob's full attention, everyone else can go to town with their magic missiles. The pace of threat for any tank that doesn't need a rectal/cranial extraction is so large that no DPS in the game could ever overcome it. Bash, bash, bash, AFK go to make a sandwich while DPS mashes out their rotations. With addons like Omen it is easy to calculate the exact point in which a boss will never leave you (unless someone else talks about their mom) with mathematical precision. 3.8 million threat, nearest rogue has 1.8 million threat and the boss has 3 million hit points left. Unless that rogue is doing 60% of the dps, you can go make your sandwich now because the fight still has about a minute and a half left .. then ten more while people argue over purple pixels and optimal resurrection order. So the question should be asked: if threat is so kludgy and artificial, what can we do to replace it? Fortunately the answer is relatively simple and has already been half implemented: increase tank DPS, lower threat per second, add more movements and threat clears to fights, lower boss damage, increase boss AOE damage, raise DPS class stamina, lower healing throughput, and make more encounters with more than one boss. - Increase Tank DPS : Already implemented and they are pretty good at it. A slight increase across the board should be made to rebalance after they are no longer the only people standing in front of the mob full time. - Lower TPS : Needs to be done in order to make the real champions of threat optimization champions again. Remember that tank in Molten Core who viewed pack tanking as his personal crusade? That guy needs to be held up as a hero, not just called out when he f*cks up. - Add more movement/threat clears : Supposedly the bosses we are fighting are generals and bodyguards and strategic geniuses that outsmarted the burning crusade, why do they act like idiots in a battleground that don't kill the healers? - Changing Taunt : Changing how threat and taunt works should make it more universal across both PvE and PvP by causing an exclusive targeting mode for several seconds (where your target is forced to target the tank) then released again. Instead of just working on hunter pets and voidwalkers off the leash, tanks would be able to force rogues to look at them for 3-5 seconds every 30 and have a chance to break up killer combos. This makes prot/tank specs useful in both PvE and PvP. - Lower Boss Damage / Lower Healing Throughput : Right now, no one but the most geared can stand in front of the ICC/ToGC bosses. The incoming damage is just too high. Because of this, the incoming healing needs to be equally as high. As a result, we are in a mexican standoff between increasing boss damage, increasing tank avoidance, and increasing healing throughput that has to end at some point. Pre-nerf, my DK was sitting at almost 60% avoidance, Cataclysm gear would put it out at 80%. The avoidance nerf was needed and is a direct result of the super high boss damage/healing rotation system that WotLK has produced. Luckily, Blizzard has already mentioned this as a problem and seems to be solving it in Cataclysm. - Multi-boss Encounters : I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been fighting single bosses for years now. Twins, Princes, and Emperors were a real treat because it makes the fights that much more complicated (without even more needless taunt cycles). Multi-boss encounters are fun and sprinkled in a bit more liberally would give tanks more things to do besides let one guy stand in the corner w/ the boss while everyone else hits him in the back and the Offtanks feel like wastes of space (or secretly hope the MT dies so they can have a moment in the sun). That is my thoughts on threat. No, it is not fun. Yes, it needs to be changed. Think I'm wrong (and I probably am)? Drop a comment here or on the official boards with your thoughts. We have the opportunity to help change the game, why not take advantage of it?

Let me start this post by saying Angrybubble is an absolute beast tankadin. Sure, he overgears heroics (~5300 GS) and probably has little need to be burning through Halls of Lightning, but man is it a work of art to see him when he's rolling. Yesterday, I had the privilege of pewpewing some magic missiles while he tore through Loken's underlings like so much trash. Afterwards, I had some time to think about what exactly made this experience so enjoyable while I was queued up for another round of the russian roulette random dungeon matchmaker. Our H-HoL run only took about eighteen minutes. First, he knows what he is doing, but most importantly, he knows what everyone else should be doing. I was put off during the first few minutes of our time together by how fast he was moving. We were on top of the General Bjarngrim before I was out of combat for the first time. Since my mage is somewhat under-geared (~4500 GS right now), I was slightly uncomfortable with his combat pace. No drinking, little time for even evocate, by the time General died, I had only a single charge left on my mana gem. However, as the General dropped below 5% life and Angrybubble peeled off to go start beating on the next pack, a thought hit me: [b]this is freaking awesome[/b]. For the first time in a long time, outside of raiding, I was mana challenged and dps challenged and not just sleeping through a 5-man. The poor tree druid (3215 GS) was sitting at about 40% mana for most of the instance and seemed to be a in a similar state as I was, just rolling with the punches. After killing Volkan with one of his add packs on us simultaneously, Angrybubble charged off towards the hallway with all the statues in it. After one pull, he said "afk one sec", was gone about fifteen seconds, then came back and started running down the hallway again leaving only a "sorry about that" in his wake. I was so surprised, a PUG tank who actually values the group time enough to apologize. Not to mention how ridiculous it is that he is apologizing to us for wasting our time after clearing HoL at a pace that I have not seen since the early days of MC speed kills. From all angles, Angrybubble is the best random HC tank I have ever grouped with (myself included). He pulled just fast enough to not quite run me or the druid completely out of mana, knew when to take the mobs one pack at a time so the druid could keep us up, and knew when to pause for 5-10 seconds to let us get back above half full. At no point during the instance was I ever at 100% mana, but at no point was I ever at 0% mana either. It seemed like he had some kind of super knowledge about his gear, the incoming damage, and the overall group DPS that when he needed 9-11 mobs on him in order to take enough damage to keep his mana up, he could do it and when only 3 would be taxing for the healer, he did that too. .. all while staying #1 in DPS. So, kudos to you, Angrybubble of Lethon, you are truly a tanking superstar as far as I am concerned. What can we learn? - If the dps and healer are over half mana, just keep on trucking. - As a mana user, you should feel pressured to decide if it's time to drink or time to pew. - You will be amazed at how fast a dungeon can be pulled with a confident tank and a terribly under-geared healer. - GS isn't everything, just look at the tree druid who kept this beast of a tankadin up. - Don't be afraid to pile packs on top of bosses, especially easy ones like Volkan. - Know when to pull one pack at a time, know when it's okay to pull three of them.

Over the past three years, something has been bugging me about Warcraft. Before you tune out, this is not a waxing poetic about the glory days of vanilla. For those of you who remember the bad old days, you might remember with fondness the battles over Hillsbrad. Without a doubt, I have the firm belief that the SS/TM war happened on every single server in the game. For the most part, a great deal of fun was had by all concerned, except the poor level 20's trying to level amidst a field of god-like 60's rampaging the countryside. That was the basis of the Alliance vs Horde experience in WoW. When Burning Crusade dropped, we got to do it all over again in the appropriately named Hellfire Peninsula. Ever wanted to know what having every single player on your server in one PvP battleground was like? Hellfire Peninsula on 16 January 2007 was probably it. I spent more time killing alliance than leveling that week and probably was about the 900th person to hit 70 on my rogue, but I know for damned sure I was in the top 10 on HK's that week and didn't do a single battleground. Prepared for even more mayhem, I was sorely disappointed when the facts of level 70 life settled right on top of me: standing around Shat. Shattrath was the first "blue" zone. Sanctuary. No PvP allowed at all, period, no exceptions. Lore-wise, it didn't make much sense either. I can kill Archimonde and Illidan, but not Alliance newbs around Shat because a giant crystal snowflake said so? Nope, we must live harmoniously with the Alliance. As the Lich King started amassing strength in Northrend, little things started to creep out about achievements like: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/619/for-the-horde/][For the Horde!][/url]. Could this be the face of the new war? Constant sieges and assaults on our Warchief, Alliance bodies littering the hallways of the Stormwind Keep and the Valley of Strength, murdering that s.o.b. King Wrynn? It was.. for a while. In reality, I have probably killed King Wrynn about 25 times in my entire WoW career, almost all of those before the Black War Bear mount was in the game when non-raid nights consisted of slipping a warlock (frequently my wife) and some rogues into Stormwind Park and summoning an entire raid army there. I think the mount was a great addition to that particular achievement, it keeps the raids going even if they are much less frequent now. Unfortunately, the only thing that I see drawing Alliance into Orgrimmar any more is the Lunar Festival. The Alliance have to ride right through Orgrimmar and next to the hall of our beloved Warchief to shake hands with a cow standing in a spotlight for 1/77th of an achievement. These poor bastards have to dodge a gauntlet of people, like me, who frequently stand next to the portal hut on the way to the back door of Org and hit them with slow over and over again while guards, newbs, and rampant Blood Elf Paladins murderfy them with no thought other than getting [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/1006/city-defender/][City Defender][/url] or maybe some casual harassment. So I pose the simple question: Is the war over? The Alliance and the Horde have signed a de-facto peace treaty with one another by continuing to live in these sanctuary cities abroad and to the North in order to better pursue the extinction of our common enemies. I believe we have been at peace for too long. As I said on twitter earlier today "Death to the Alliance, full time, all the time. Dalaran should have streets filled with blood." Maybe the last half of that sentence is a bit of hyperbole, but the sentiment remains the same: We should be killing the Lich King *and* the Alliance. We are the Horde, we can do both. While making Dalaran/Shat a free fire zone seems a bit extreme, the war can be ramped up safely in the old world where we don't share a home and here is how: 1) Establish buffs to honor in battlegrounds, Wintergrasp, and world PvP (including capital cities) for killing a world faction leader in the past week. To aid the defenders, slow the respawn on Thrall, Wrynn and the rest down to 24 hours and reward everyone in the capital city zone with a set amount of honor every time a raid of significant numbers touches a world leader and he lives through the combat (with a proper cooldown to prevent exploits). Also, these events should favor the defenders by allowing them to use siege engines and other devices around the city to kill attackers at choke points similar to Wintergrasp walls with portals for defenders only. 2) Double honor gained for killing a player in a capital city. Also remove diminishing returns on players killed in capital cities. If two horde and two alliance want to farm honor for 19 hours by repeatedly killing each other and ressing, so be it, though I doubt many will sit by with reds in their capital cities. Honor for gear is not exactly valuable, with rated battlegrounds coming up, even less so. 3) Establish a criteria for city offense/defense as part of the new rank structure when it returns. Warlords should have been a part of many city sieges on both sides of the lines, not just over some timber hut in the middle of Warsong forest. Require world leader kills and player kills in enemy territory, just like with achievements now, but cumulative, in order to avoid the full time job with overtime that High Warlord became before. 4) Give honor/arena gear price discounts for players with city raiding achievements. There should be a reward, a real, tangible reward for taking the battle to the Alliance where they live and to keeping Thrall safe. This seems trivial but completely worth it. Now Gladiators, High Warlords, and newb level 70's have a reason to jump into the war with both feet, even if they're only in it for the honor. Additionally, make the discount expire every arena season, corresponding to new campaigns in the war. 5) [[ When this post was starting to be written, this said give world PvP'ers ways to get the gear that only BG marks received before, but that has since been put in the works via 3.3.3. Kudos, Blizzard, on finally killing BG Marks, I am not sad to see them go. ]] .. and that's it. The point is to make killing a world faction leader something to be proud of. The Lich King is very important, but so is Thrall. It's time it felt that way. #ForTheHorde!

Like a great deal of other players, I took the holiday season off from WoW. I did my best to focus on real life and not engage Azeroth in any way, knowing that the Lich King was being sieged and his minions put to the sword. I held out quite well, I think. However, like Punxsutawney Phil, I have emerged from my burrow to look around at the snow covered ground and catch up on what I have missed these past four months. Wow, has the World (of Warcraft) moved fast. Four months is like 50 years in Internet Time, so it's like 150 years in WoW time. My formerly pretty pimping gear is now worse than the lowest rung of welfare epics. After playing with the dungeon finder, I figured out what a great addition it is to WoW and that it finally has allowed me to play as DPS instead of full time Tank. So I have decided to switch to DPS for a while and see how that side of life is (chasing the mob vs it chasing you). However, my DPS gear is in pretty bad shape, worse than my tanking gear by quite a bit. My gear score is sitting at around 4610 according to the addon, 2390 according to wow-heroes. So, the long look upward has started again. I am barely more geared than a level 80 fresh out of Icecrown questing. A few lucky drops here and there, a few breaks from nice raid leaders, and a whole lot of 5-man instancing should put me back where I like to be: comfortably mediocre raid gear (~264). For those of you also in a similar predicament or maybe just needing to fill a gear gap here and there for your off spec, I will outline a quick list of gear that is attainable without raiding, without rep grinding, and without needing to pander to wanna-be hardcores still grinding out ToC10 on regular modes. Total (assuming higher iLvL and set pieces): - Emblems of Triumph: 210 - Emblems of Frost: 150 - Gold: 3,550 - Honor Points: 52,000 - Some runs through Pit of Saron - Some runs through Halls of Reflection - Some luck to get a hilt drop. End gear score: 5060 (or enough to get into most of the PUG raids on Deathwing) [u]Head[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45299/dragonsteel-faceplate/]Dragonsteel Faceplate[/url] - 219 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/48503/koltiras-helmet-of-conquest/]Koltira's Helmet of Conquest[/url] - 232 - Emblems of Triumph(50) [u]Neck[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45819/spiked-battleguard-choker/]Spiked Battleguard Choker[/url] - 226 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49485/sparkling-onyxia-tooth-pendant/]Sparkling Onyxia Tooth Pendant[/url] - 245 - Onyxia's Head Quest *raid encounter Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50228/barbed-ymirheim-choker/]Barbed Ymirheim Choker[/url] - 232 - Pit of Saron(H) [u]Shoulder[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/46117/conquerors-darkruned-shoulderplates/]Conquerer's Darkruned Shoulderplate[/url] - 226 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/48505/koltiras-shoulderplates-of-conquest/]Koltira's Shoulderplates of Conquest[/url] - 232 - Emblems of Triumph(30) [u]Back[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/42067/deadly-gladiators-cloak-of-triumph/]Deadly Gladiator's Cloak of Triumph[/url] =( - 219 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47320/might-of-the-nerub/]Might of the Nerub[/url] - 245 - Anub'arak(25N) * raid encounter Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/51354/wrathful-gladiators-cloak-of-triumph/]Wrathful Gladiator's Cloak of Triumph[/url] - 264 - 52,200 Honor Points * Currently, next to weapons, I believe the Back is the hardest item to gear without a raid [u]Chest[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/46111/conquerors-darkruned-battleplate/]Conquerer's Darkruned Battleplate[/url] - 226 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/48501/koltiras-battleplate-of-conquest/]Koltira's Battleplate of Conquest[/url] - 232 - Emblem of Triumph(50) Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50272/frost-wyrm-ribcage/]Frost Wyrm Ribcage[/url] - 232 - Pit of Saron(H) [u]Wrist[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47565/vambraces-of-unholy-command/]Vambraces of Unholy Command[/url] - 219 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47572/titanium-spikeguards/]Titanium Spikeguards[/url] - 245 - Blacksmithed (~2300g on Deathwing) Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50230/malykriss-vambraces/]Malykriss Vambraces[/url] - 232 - Pit of Saron(H) [u]Hand[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45341/valorous-darkruned-gauntlets/]Valorous Darkruned Gauntlets[/url] (seriously) - 219 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/48502/koltiras-gauntlets-of-conquest/]Koltira's Gauntlets of Conquest[/url] - 232 - Emblems of Triumph(30) [u]Waist[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45824/belt-of-the-singing-blade/]Belt of the Singing Blade[/url] - 226 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50987/malevolent-girdle/]Malevolent Girdle[/url] - 264 - Emblem of Frost(60) [u]Legs[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47495/legplates-of-relentless-onslaught/]Legplates of Relentless Onslaught[/url] - 219 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/48504/koltiras-legplates-of-conquest/]Koltira's Legplates of Conquest[/url] - 232 - Emblems of Triumph(30) [u]Feet[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47511/plated-greaves-of-providence/]Plated Greaves of Provenience[/url] - 219 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50305/grinning-skull-boots/]Grinning Skull Boots[/url] - 232 - Halls of Reflection(H) Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49906/hellfrozen-bonegrinders/]Hellfrozen Bonegrinders[/url] - 264 - Blacksmithing (expensive as hell) [u]Ring 1[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/42115/deadly-gladiators-band-of-victory/]Deadly Gladiator's Band of Victory[/url] - 213 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50453/ring-of-rotting-sinew/]Ring of Rotting Sinew[/url] - 264 - BoE (expensive) Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/51559/runed-ring-of-the-kirin-tor/]Runed Ring of the Kirin Tor[/url] - 251 - Vendor in Dal (1250g) [u]Ring 2[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49000/titan-forged-band-of-victory/]Titan-forged Band of Victory[/url] - 226 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47729/bloodshed-band/]Bloodshed Band[/url] - 245 - Emblem of Triumph(30) Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50271/band-of-stained-souls/]Band of Stained Souls[/url] - 232 - Pit of Saron(H) * Not perfect, has agi on it [u]Trinket 1[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/42987/darkmoon-card-greatness/]Darkmoon Card : Greatness[/url] - 200 - Has been a real PITA to replace Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50355/herkuml-war-token/]Herkuml War Token[/url] - 264 - Emblem of Frost(60) Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47303/deaths-choice/]Death's Choice[/url] - 245 - ToC25(N) * Raid encounter [u]Trinket 2[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/40684/mirror-of-truth/]Mirror of Truth[/url] - 200 - Yes, seriously Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50198/needle-encrusted-scorpion/]Needle Encrusted Scorpion[/url] - 232 - Pit of Saron(H) [u]Sigil[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45254/sigil-of-the-vengeful-heart/]Sigil of the Vengeful Heart[/url] - 226 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50459/sigil-of-the-hanged-man/]Sigil of the Hanged Man[/url] - 264 - Emblem of Frost(30) [u]Weapon[/u] Currently: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45282/ironsoul/]Ironsoul[/url] - 219 Replacement: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50267/tyrannical-beheader/]Tyrannical Beheader[/url] - 232 - Pit of Saron(H) Alternative: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50048/quel-delar-might-of-the-faithful/]Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful[/url] - 251 - Lucky me: My gift from the Pit of Saron for coming back to WoW

As we look forward to climbing the heights and plumbing the depths of Icecrown Citadel, many changes are going on behind the scenes to our beloved Unholy Death Knight's arsenal. The most significant change is the newly redesigned Scourge Strike: [i]The base ability now deals 50% weapon damage plus an additional amount as physical damage. However, for each disease thedeath knight has on the target, the target will take additional shadowdamage equal to 25% of the physical damage done.[/i] This means that if you're holding a cheap ass iLvL 219 Ironsoul like I am, your SS is going to do a nice chunk of damage compared to now(upwards of 8k). Armor pen is going to push SS damage even higher,meaning all you folks who stored up a nice blood set with high ArP might want to give UH DPS a try as your secondary spec to see how theother half lives. As you can see, the damage potential for SS just skyrocketed so long as you can keep your diseases up. Along with this damage boost, there are several nerfs. Unholy Blight and the 4T9 Bonus got nerfed by 50% each. UB now does 10% bonus damage in the form of a DoT instead of 20% when you throw a deathcoil. 4T9 only makes blood plague critable instead of any disease, which was a response to the crazy frost fever pumping a lot of UHDK's were doing via glyph and frost sub specs. Glyph of Icy Touch got changed from a RP generator to a 20% frost fever damage bonus to curtail the fact that Unholy's most viable rotation involved generating as many DC's a possible (check 2000+ rated DK's in any S7 bracket, notice they're all UH and half don't even have SS). Also, the pets got screwed in PvP by changing Night of the Dead into a 45/90% AoE immunity that applies to PvE only, so expect some drilling on your zombies to occur in arena again, they're no longer just nice little DoTs waiting to be turned into 40% of your hit points. Unholy is almost reverting back to it's 3.1 state with these changes. Once again the Unholy DK is focusing on keeping diseases up, even clipping them at times, and throwing DC's when spare GCD's are available. I consider this more in line with what a Death Knight should be worried about while DPS'ing, even if a lot of folks disagree with me. The classic Unholy Death Knight is re-emerging. Unholy is still strong on DPS and competitive (1-2%) with it's Frost and Blood brothers on single target DPS. I believe it is the strongest AoE spec in the entire game. Played correctly, an Unholy DK that knows where to put himself and how to get diseases going is unparalleled indamage capacity. With the nerf on targeted AoE spells coming up, this ability will only shine brighter compared to rogues, mages and hunters trying to beast down packs with fan of knives, blizzard or volley. Ebon Plaguebringer continues to be unique to Unholy DK's and continues to provide that great extra boost that makes bringing an Unholy DK as dps along pay off. With rumors of Bone Shield going to a 5 minute duration (up for 1 minute), life as a DPS Unholy DK is going to get even better. My lone concern at the moment is arena participation. Without changes to cleansing totem spam or a real improvement in virulence to boost it to 50% disease dispel immunity, I do not see how these changes will make more DK gladiators. Nerfing DC is a kick in the teeth considering it's the only viable arena spec right now. Even improving SS damage is not going to make up for it considering how anaemic it is now. Less than 1% of all gladiators are Death Knights (any spec) and nerfing our chief arena abilities (4T9 and RP generation for DC) is only going to make that number go down. I hate to say it, but Blizzard has stated that classes without MS should do more damage than classes that bring it, where is our PvP damage buff to bring us up to the same level as Warriors and Rogues? Over all, I look forward to 3.3 dropping and trying like hell to figure out how to wrangle a Shadowmourne out of the place. My pursuit will probably ultimately fail since all of the raid guilds on Deathwing are ran by 13 year old twits, but I will see Arthas die and enjoy the moment. Bring it on, Blizz. (I *am* prepared?)

.. or whatever your zombie is named. I recently came across an [url=http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t72364-unholy_dps_scourge_strike_all_i_ever_wanted/#post1369597]excellent post on Elitist Jerks[/url] that outlined a few things most of us probably were not aware of about our best friend in whole unholy world. 1) Ghoul hit ratings are rounded down, so if you have 7.99% bonus hit, your ghoul only has 7%. 2) Ghouls gain expertise based on your hit rating. So if you have 4% hit, your pet also has 4% hit and 13 expertise. 3) Ghouls benefit from the haste provided by Unholy Presence, but not the damage of Blood Presence. 4) Ghouls receive 100% of your haste rating. (Includes Engineering Gloves and Unholy Presence!) 5) Ghouls receive the same Paladin greater blessings as rogues in your raid. 6) Army of the Dead zombies and Gargoyles will target the same commands your ghoul does (includes stay, follow, and attack). 7) Your ghoul, when properly controlled, is over 10% of your personal DPS in any given fight. Taking care of him is the key to maximizing your Unholy DPS.

Since questions about hit cap seem to get asked about nine times a day in /2 and even [url=http://epicadvice.com/questions/5/what-is-the-hit-cap-for-a-level-80-death-knight]warranted a question over on EpicAdvice.com[/url], I decided to do a short Q&A post now that I'm back from vacation (which was relaxing, tyvm). * These questions are accurate circa-3.2.2. ** All of these questions, unless specified, are for PvE DK's fighting lvl 80 bosses (effective lvl 83). [b]Q: What is the melee hit cap for non-dual wield DK's?[/b] [i]A: 8% or 263 Hit Rating. [/i] - We currently have no +hit talents for 2h'ers, so just make sure your gear/gems has 264 hit on it or better. It is the best stat you can get until cap. [b]Q:[/b] What is the melee hit cap for dual wielding Frost DK's? [i]A: 5% or 164 Hit Rating. [/i] - With 3/3 Nerves of Cold Steel, a talent every DW Frost DK should have, you get 3% hit for free (and a healthy buff to off hand damage). Sims and parses have demonstrated that keeping yourself at the effective hit cap (3/3 NoCS + 164 Hit Rating) and supplementing the gem spots that were used for hit for Str/ArP/AP instead produces a DPS boost. [b]Q: What is the melee hit cap for non-frost DW DK's?[/b] [i]A: 8% or 263 Hit Rating[/i] - The math just does not back up going over the yellow hit cap (special attacks). After 264, hit rating goes down hill pretty fast compared to strength or AP. [b]Q: What is the spell hit cap for Death Knights?[/b] [i]A: 17% or 446 hit rating. [/i] - This number is unapproachable without serious DPS sacrifices elsewhere. Stick to 264 and take Virulence in the Unholy tree if you are that worried about spell hit. [b]Q: What is the PvP hit cap?[/b] [i]A: 5% or 164 hit rating.[/i] - At level 80, all players (except night elves) are the same level and thus only suffer the base miss rate. Night Elves "Quickness" racial gives them 2% extra miss. [b]Q: What is expertise cap and when do I use it as a Death Knight?[/b] [i]A: 6.5% or 26 expertise rating. [/i] - Expertise is a stat which lowers the likelihood that your target will dodge/parry your attacks. Most Death Knights ignore expertise unless they are tanking because a boss only parries from the front and only the tank should be in front of the boss and DPS DK's have more valuable dps stats to boost before expertise. [b]Q: What runeforge should I be using on my DPS 2h'er?[/b] [i]A: Rune of the Fallen Crusader[/i] - At the present time (3.2.2), there is no viable 2h spec that does not benefit from FC. [b]Q: What runeforge should I be using on my Tanking 2h'er?[/b] [i]A: Rune of the Stone Gargoyle[/i] - Stone Gargoyle effectively increases the soft defense cap from 540 to 565, resulting in a free .9634% dodge and parry. [b]Q: What runeforges should I be using as Frost DW DK?[/b] [i]A: Fallen Crusader main hand, Razorice offhand. [/i] - If you are on a target long enough to get RI to stack up, the debuff really starts to pay dividends compared to any alternative. [b]Q: What runeforges should I be using as non-frost DW DK?[/b] [i]A: Fallen Crusader on both hands. [/i] - There really is no alternative at the present time.

[url=http://twitter.com/greth22]Celaria[/url] made a wonderful post on [url=http://jteager.com/viper/]I Was In Viper[/url] called [url=http://jteager.com/viper/?p=66]"Talents that will not exist next year"[/url]. After reading through all of the passive bonus/mana bonus talents in the Hunter trees, I started thinking about what our trees would look like come next expansion. Doing a little digging and not so much thinking, I started to realize that our talents are the most in shape out of any class with regards to "Cataclysm Ready". Almost every talent we have does something actively present that is not present passively 100% of the time. While I do think that a lot of our talents are "overburdened", 29 of 94 talents have two or more effects, not many of them are passively so. [b]Blood[/b] - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/bladed_armor/]Bladed Armor[/url]: Almost a mandatory DPS talent in every build right now. I would not be surprised if attack power gets pushed into Blood's passive bonus stack along with ArP [if they choose to keep it at all] and +% healing bonus. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/two-handed-weapon-specialization/]Two-Handed Weapon Spec[/url] : A prime candidate for the "Path of the Ancients" bonuses where this type of decision can be made more easily. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/dark-conviction/]Dark Conviction[/url] - > [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/bloody-vengeance/]Bloody Vengeance[/url] : Much like the Paladin versions (Conviction->Vengeance), I expect whatever tree gets made into our "hard physical dps" tree, this will be built into it again. Whether or not that is the blood tree remains to be seen. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/veteran-of-the-third-war/]Veteran of the Third War[/url] : Has been our trash collection talent since it was first implemented in WotLK beta. It has slowly grown into a three part talent that has been nerfed or buffed almost every patch in the past year. Super passive, too good to pass up most of the time. [b]Frost[/b] - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/toughness/]Toughness[/url] : There is a version of toughness in every single melee class talent set in the game. I don't know how to best handle it, because there needs to be a trade off in talents for pvp survivability or talents become very unnecessary. Trading five points to get out of movement slowing effects 30% faster is a nice bonus, almost something that should be rolled into resilience or put as a set bonus on gladiator armor scaling up to five pieces for 30%. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/black-ice/]Black Ice[/url] : The definition of a passive talent that Blizzard is trying to get rid of. Replacing it with a disease that makes people take 10% more frost and shadow damage would be a great change. Raid utility and dps all rolled into one. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/nerves-of-cold-steel/]Nerves of Cold Steel[/url] /[url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/threat-of-thassarian/]Threat of Thassarian[/url] : Passive dual wield bonuses that should be wrapped into the frost tree passive stack. As you put points in frost, your offhand does more damage, you hit more, and you double strike more often. Just makes sense. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/frigid-dreadplate/]Frigid Dreadplate[/url] : Another passive talent that should be rolled into frost's passive stack and replaced with something like "5/10/15% chance to cause fear in your attacker when struck in melee combat". That would teach the paladins their place. ^^ [b]Unholy[/b] - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/anticipation/]Anticipation[/url] : Another pure passive talent that will get rolled into Unholy's passive bonus stack. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/ravenous-dead/]Ravenous Dead[/url] : The ghoul is the bread and butter of the Unholy Death Knight's talent dps. Making a 51 point Unholy DK's ghoul better than a 20 point or 0 point Unholy ghoul just makes sense. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/necrosis/]Necrosis[/url] : Unlike Black Ice, I think this talent could work with a minor change. Instead of doing 20% more as shadow, changing the auto-attack damage to be 50% disease or poison/50% physical would be a great utility for the Unholy DK's. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/dirge/]Dirge[/url] : Much like Chill of the Grave in the frost tree, this talent needs to be reworked int a passive stack bonus at a certain number of unholy talent points spent. No one likes spending talent points on +2.5 rune power per Icy Touch. - [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/impurity/]Impurity[/url] : Much like Bladed Armor, this talent should be rolled into Unholy's passive bonus stack. As Frost does not have a general +AP talent like Impurity or Bladed Armor, I don't see this becoming a general passive bonus based on level. Lastly, the Death Rune talents need to be reworked. As they are now, they are mandatory in every single tree regardless of spec or rotation. If you aren't using some rotation that consists of F->U->FU->B->B->Dump->FU->FU>Dump->DD, I don't know what you're doing, but it needs to change. [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/death-rune-mastery/]Death Rune Mastery[/url], [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/blood-of-the-north/]Blood of the North[/url], and [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/reaping/]Reaping[/url] are all worthy of becoming a passive bonus in each tree. Keeping them out of the general Deathknight bonuses will prevent the Unholy Obliterate rotations from coming back and keep everyone using the appropriate strikes as they should. Given all of that, I think we will see a lot of these replaced with Desolation/Desecration like talents that split up effects into multiple talent spots. Almost every one of the tier 10 talents does two things, one passive buff, one mechanic, and they are all prime targets for replacement. However, I think we will also see a lot of new talents in the middle, not necessarily a 66 point talent point level. So, like everyone else, I'm adding my speculation to the mob voice and hoping for the best. What do you think is going away? What do you hope is going away?

Since I have been giving ram riding lessons on Deathwing outside Orgrimmar all week (starting with my wife), I decided I should post a picture of the path I use to run the keg delivery quest that nets me ~30 tickets per day. Basically, you only use two apple baskets, the one in the middle behind the rock on your left as you're traveling south to pick up a keg and the barrel behind the keg receiver inside the little pen by where you got the mount in the first place. If you are whipping the crap out of your ram, you will reach the first barrel in ~65 fatigue, it will reset. You will receive your keg with ~45 fatigue and get back to the barrel with ~75 fatigue, where it will reset again. Now ride straight for the barrel behind the turn in spot and loop by the goblin on your way out to drop it off. Violla.

Around the 29th of July this year (2009), I got it in my craw that I was going to become a fisherman. I had been wanting to do fishing since I got my [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/150/the-fishing-diplomat/]Fishing Diplomat[/url] achievement during a [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/619/for-the-horde/]For The Horde![/url] raid back in December. Since classic, the whole idea of fishing has been interesting to me but ultimately pretty boring after an hour. Cast, wait, click, repeat. It started out pretty innocently: a pole, some worms, and the nice expanse of water in the Valley of Strength in Org. Before long, I was talking about fishing hats, eternium line, and designer fishing poles. My wife remarked that all I talked about for a while was fishing. When I sat down to get started, I started doing research on fishing while skilling up my fishing. This is extremely easy to do while fishing as long as you have the sound on and two monitors. Eventually, I was pointed to a very helpful site called [url=http://www.elsanglin.com]El's Extreme Anglin'[/url] where other folks like me have gotten together to discuss this most strange niche of World of Warcraft. Like most landlubbers, I had no idea how deep fishing had become since it has few patch notes and where fishing was patched, it was generally on the back of a greater overhaul of something much larger [like WoW 2.0 and 3.0]. Fishing isn't just cast, wait, and click anymore. You have to know where to fish, what to wear, and how to get the right cast in order to be successful. The achievements for fishing are only the start. Catch a few thousand fish and you start to get an appreciation for people who have both [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/old-ironjaw/]Old Ironjaw[/url] and [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/old-crafty/]Ol' Crafty[/url] which is probably 3000 fish caught on average to get them both while ducking opposite faction members in their capital. I got lucky, I caught Crafty after only 154 casts. It puts me in the top 20% fewest casts to catch this particular fish. I'm 1900 casts deep into Old Ironjaw from three separate trips to Ironforge just to catch him and I still haven't bagged the bugger. [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/old_crafty_acheive.jpg[/img] My rare fishing fetish started in Dalaran before I had ever heard about the turtle mount or Old Ironjaw. Most of you probably know exactly what I'm talking about now. Yes, I was one of those zombies standing by the fountain next to the Alliance bank just casting, casting, casting. I counted around 2800 casts and many, many sessions by the fountain when I finally got my [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/44430/titanium-seal-of-dalaran/]Titanium Seal of Dalaran[/url]. I used to fish in the fountain whenever I had a few seconds of time. Ten to fifteen casts before getting and after turning in the fishing daily, a short five minute session while waiting on a group for heroics, another stand while waiting on the raid to start, a few minutes before I logged out netted me several casts and coins. When I finished, I realized I had fished on three separate computers for what must have been several dozen hours. [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/2096/the-coin-master/]The Coin Master[/url] got me from 150 to 450 fishing and easily helped my [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/1561/1000-fish/]1000 fish[/url] achievement as well. [img]http://phreakre.com/images/screenshots/1000_fish.jpg[/img] While finishing my coin collection, I started spending time in the sewers hunting down [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/1958/i-smell-a-giant-rat/]my giant rat[/url], but it still has not come up (938 casts later). Between ratting sessions, I started fishing Outland for shits and giggles. After a month out there, I came back with a [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/35349/snarlys-bucket/]sewer crocalisk pet[/url] and a large collection of junk from the pools and streams I had been fishing for the [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/outland-angler/]Outland Angler[/url] achievement. If one thing could define my fishing experience as a whole, it's [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/a/726/mr-pinchys-magical-crawdad-box/]Mr. Pinchy's Magical Crawdad Box[/url]. It has started to become the number one thing I talk to other fishermen about: Have you tried to catch Mr. Pinchy? What happened? The number one answer is always "I hate that damned crawdad". I, personally, had a great time with the Crawdad of Death. Several of my wishes were an enraged Crawdad Guardian that followed my Death Knight around several dungeons and waylaid mobs for lots of damage. My third wish granted me the magical crawdad pet. I was lucky. According to a fisherwoman in a former guild of mine, Mr. Pinchy is a curse upon her house. He has killed her multiple times and ruined many of her trips to great places like Gadgetzan [where he attacks the guards for shits and giggles]. Another fisherman has fished up Mr. Pinchy no less than five times and never been awarded a trip to the magical crawdad box. It took me three days to catch [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/27388/mr-pinchy/]Mr. Pinchy[/url] and he capitulated to my achievement addiction shortly there after. I still have a lot of fishing left to do. I need to catch Old Ironjaw, the Turtle Mount, the Giant Sewer Rat, and one of the super rare fish that won't get away. Most of all, I need to win the Sunday Fishing Tournament in STV. I have tried a few different Sundays. After helping Drosophilia from the guild get his Salty title by harassing Alliance and Horde while he fished pools for tasty fish, I decided to start doing the tournament myself. A few Sundays later, I got my wife's paladin to help me since this seems to be more of a PvP event than a fishing tournament most days on Deathwing as of late. I have never come close (28 fish when the tournament was won on my last try). I think short of fielding half a raid to run pool recon, alliance bashing, and Horde-on-Horde bobber harassment, the tournament is not winnable. Too many people have too many friends trying to get this title and the pool only shrinks by one a week. As of late, my fishing has consisted of doing the Dalaran fishing daily in hopes of netting the designer [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45992/jeweled-fishing-pole/]Jeweled Fishing Pole[/url] or the [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45991/bone-fishing-pole/]Bone Fishing Pole[/url]. I also have been hitting Wintergrasp for combinations of glacial salmon, nettlefish, and musselback sculpin, which the expert anglers amongst you will recognize immediately as the recipe components to a vital raid buff. @Warcraft had a daily question via twitter concerning anglers and their fishing outfits. My outfit? Furious Gladiator's Dreadplate, cause fishing is a full contact sport on Deathwing. =) So when you see someone walking around with the "Salty" title, realize what an accomplishment it is. They have done something right up there with getting Celestial Defender. There are only, at most, 52 "salty" titles given out a year if none of the expert anglers decide to win the Tournament multiple times. I'm still working on my title. Maybe one day, I'll get lucky and no mammoth riding retards in will stand on my lure during the tournament, but I'm not betting on it..

I started to write a from the ground up post about being a Blood DK, but decided it was too much work and most people bothering to read a DK Blog probably know how to run their character by now. So instead, I will focus on a guidelines for Blood ( [url=http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#jfVMVh0IcfofostZfzhhxc:IGL0mV]51/0/20[/url]) in 3.2 and hope you guys can figure out the rest. First and foremost, Blood is our most gear dependent spec. Right now, it relies on a lot of armor penetration(ArP) and pumping out lots of pure physical dps to do it's business. So if you are considering a switch to blood or wondering why your blood dps is so bad, chances are you are looking right at the problem: your character. I recommend trying Blood after you have access to 50% ArP cap (699 ArP) and [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/grim-toll/]Grim Toll[/url] or [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/mjolnir-runestone/]Mjolnir Runestone[/url] as a trinket, your other trinket being [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/darkmoon-card-greatness/]Darkmoon Card: Greatness[/url] or something like it. The reason for the trinket choice and ArP limit is the ArP cap is 100% of your opponents armor ( 1399.6 ArP as of 3.2.2). With the procs from the trinkets, you will hit this 100% cap and not waste any itemization points. Weapons and armor are pretty standard. All our tier gear seems to play well with blood provided you are using your non-sets for ArP. The sets will get you hit and some nice addons plus a good strength base, the non-sets will fill out your dps with armor pen or whatever else becomes great after ArP gets nerfed pretty soon. Also, be sure to grab your biggest, baddest two-handed weapon and slap a Fallen Crusader on it. There is no such thing as dual wield blood right now, at least if you don't want to be laughed at. For sigils, I recommend [url=db.mmo-champion.com/i/sigil-of-the-vengeful-heart/]Sigil of the Vengeful Heart[/url] as your primary choice. Haunted Dreams adds crit via strikes blood uses all the time, but not enough. Virulence does not apply to Blood strikes and Awareness benefits a strike that does not come up very often in the rotation (death strike only happens twice every 20 seconds), though it would be a close second choice if you can't get your hands on a SoVH. Although somewhat rare, SoVH is worth the effort. Your glyph choices are pretty light if all you care about is dps: Death Strike for a nice bonus so long as you stay above 25 RP, Dancing Rune Weapon for a nice bump to the 51 point talent point now that it is stabilized at 60 RP cost and duration, and Dark Death. Some have criticized the DD rune, but a 20% damage bump to what is normally 15-20% of Blood's damage is better than you will get out of any talent points. Finally, your rotation is pretty easy: IT -> PS -> HS -> HS -> DS -> Dump -> DS -> HS x 4 -> Dump for single target. For AoE targets, sub in epidemic after disease application and just keep the rotation the same. Blood boil has proven to be less dps than Heart Strike, including groups of up to five mobs. Even with the pending Heart Strike nerf, you will still be doing pristine dps against pairs of targets. However, do not forget about your rune of Death Strike and keep your RP above 25 at all times. Popping DRW at the right time and keeping your ghoul summon on cool down are the marks of a good Blood DPS'er. Good luck. I can't promise this information is useful, just accurate. Blood is on top for a lot of people, just not for this particular DK.

I have several pet peeves with the Unholy tree. I played a hunter for a long time and I hated the damned pet. Pet controls in WoW are pretty simple: attack, stay there, follow me, and a special button for whatever class of pet you have (ours is a stun), plus seven other buttons that do basically the same thing or turn on/off special attacks. They lack the nuance required to make pets anything other than a passive dot with yet another cooldown I have to watch. What I really want instead of giving me a pet to run in and out of fire is a button called "Ghoul Sickness" that does whatever damage over time Blizzard wants me to have for my pet and another button for the stun. This allows me to remove a hot bar from my screen, ignore the other 8 buttons on the damned thing, and focus on what I really care about: making my deathknight work right. Unfortunately, there is not really a dps alternative in the unholy tree at present for replacing the ghoul. He's not a nice little addon in the first four tiers of the unholy tree that any DK can get if they so choose to avoid bladed armor or killing machine and want to play a pet class. It's ~30% of the damage in the unholy tree and a very un-fun ~30%, in my opinion. Step into the arena and you get to run a crazy scheme resembling: ghoul in, chains, PS, feared, give chase, death coil, ghoul jump, get rooted, zombie stun, ss, ss, dc, get over here, ss. dc. The guys with really high arena ratings, especially 2v2, that run unholy with ghoul have my respect. Running the pet with the necessary control to arena successfully is like learning to play the piano well with your toes. Now we come to the kludgiest part of ghoul mastery: Ghoul Frenzy. I often ask myself two questions: What problem was ghoul frenzy trying to solve? Did it solve it? I believe Ghoul Frenzy was trying to solve two problems: reduce AoE damage the ghoul takes by providing a way to restore pet life without using death coils and passively boost ghoul DPS a bit to put it back in competition with the growing threat that was 2h Frost. The heal over time was a compromise since giving it back instantly makes it almost impossible to kill a ghoul unless the DK is ignoring him in the first place and also it does not nullify half of death coil's utility. The HoT means a pet can regenerate under harse AoE conditions since [url=]http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/night-of-the-dead]Night of the Dead[/url] reduces aoe damage taken by ghouls to manageable levels. This makes the ghoul more of a valuable pet and less of a suicide bomber (anyone remember ghoul jump + OP corpse explosion from early 3.0?) that is easily replaced every 30 seconds. Unfortunately, ghoul frenzy did not really adequately solve the problem. Where did Blizzard expect GF to fit into the unholy rotation exactly? IT -> PS -> SS/OB -> BS -> BS -> Dump -> GF -> IT -> SS/OB -> SS/OB -> Dump? No one in their right mind is trading a monster SS/OB for ghoul white damage haste plus an icy touch, not even to keep it alive. What needs to happen is ghoul frenzy needs to be changed to a blood rune so it stops throwing off the FU strike rotations and be put onto the [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/reaping/]reaping[/url] talent so the second half of the rotation doesn't lose it's third SS/OB before the dump. Most Unholy DK's just skip Ghoul Frenzy, myself included, knowing it's a DPS loss while learning to cope with the times that their pet is going to get immolated. Most major fights have a breather period where a pet re-summon doesn't hurt DPS too much anyways.

As of late, a lot of mumbling has gone on concerning the new, improved dual-wielding death knight. I have already [url=http://hordeofone.phreakre.com/blog/view/2]posted at length about dw frost dps[/url], so I will instead take this opportunity to present arguments for the new improved DW Frost DK Tank in 3.2. One of the constant conversational arguments is "DW DK Tanks lose because of parry haste". Another is "DW brings more threat". Well, we'll see.. For those of you living the blessed existence to not know what parry haste is, it is a mechanic by which an enemy parries you, causing his next attack to happen 40% faster. However, like all mechanics in warcraft, it is not that simple. The parry haste only affects the time remaining on the next melee attack swing, so if their attack speed is 2.6 seconds and they parry at 2.5 seconds, the next attack will happen in .06 seconds. Conversely, if the parry happens at 0.6 seconds into the swing timer, their next attack happens 1.2 seconds later instead of 2 seconds later [ 2.6 - 0.6 = 2.0 * .4 = .8, 2.0 - .8 = 1.2 sec]. This makes modeling parry haste a bit difficult because boss swing timers vary, about 350 different stats and states effect parry, and the effects of parrying the offhand in a dual-wield situation seem to just mess everything up. The following is how I have reasoned out the worst case scenario for the DW DK Tank: that the offhand is separately parry-able in ToT enabled strikes, that you are attacking twice as often, and battling the worst type of boss: pure physical damage with a slow swing timer. Bosses have 14% parry and 6.5% dodge from the front when you have 0 expertise. That means that the main trade off as a DW tank vs a "traditional" tank (2h dk/war/paly) is the extra parry-able attacks that you will be throwing at a much faster pace compared to a 2h tank. With 2.6spd weapons, a DK will execute ~600 attacks ,84 of which will be parried, against the average boss (5 min fight, attack from the front, parry-haste boss). 2h DK tanks will throw only ~235, causing 33 parries. So DW will evoke 34 extra attacks over five minutes compared to a 2h tank's 13 extra attacks. While this sounds bad, they don't all happen at once unless you are very unlucky, in which case I would recommend you start reading some of my dps threads. Spread out over 5 minutes, you're incurring ~2 extra attacks per 30 seconds over "traditional" tanking. This means a DW tank without any of the DW bonuses will take 5.4% more damage than a traditional tank in the worst case scenario where all parries happen simultaneously with swing timer resets. In reality, the parries will happen all over the swing timer and average to the halfway point of any given swing timer, so the real damage differential approaches 2.7% more damage when 2h frost is the baseline. DW Frost also gives up Rune of Stone Gargoyle. SG provides you with +25 def outside of the diminishing returns defense cap and +2% health. It is the best tank enchant in the game and it's all DK. I would kill for a 1h version that gives +12def/+1% health (rune of grave guardian?), but that is another subject. The logic of this rune is that there are 1h tanking weapons built for DK's (two in the entire game over iLvL 200) and they all have ~+12 def on them, so stone gargoyle provides the +25 defense and also something for us def capers in the form of 2% health. Additionally, Stone Gargoyle moves the defense soft cap up from 540 to 565 (extra 0.6944% dodge/parry). In SG's place, Rune of Swordbreaking is used for +2% parry (x2) outside of the DR. This means a DW Frost DK using SS over SG on both weapons will have 2% less life, 1% less dodge, and 3.066% more parry. A net win after sufficiently high HP levels [40k+], in my opinion. This means that a DW tank actually takes 0.633% more damage than a traditional tank after a basic rune shift. If 0.633% more tank damage is "raid ending", you're either breaking HM Uld or pugging Naxx right now. Besides, the increased threat should more than make up for the increased damage. If your dps'ers are anything like mine, they are just chomping at the bit to keep below your threat for the first minutes of a battle. Traditional frost tank spec ([url=http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=0055320000000000000000000000305050003520330023012031013510050000000000000000000000000000&glyph=201318000000&version=10192]15/51/5[/url]) accounts for ~700 TPS less threat than new DW Frost Tank spec ([url=http://wow.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=6&tal=0055300000000000000000000000305053003500330003002330013510052000000000000000000000000000]12/52/7[/url]). Either way, it's worth a shot when you think your healers are not out of their depth and DPS making a tight enrage timer is that problem. I have been alternating between 2h and DW for a few weeks now and I notice that it is easier to keep threat up in difficult situations as DW, but I take a noticeable amount of increased damage against slow hitting bosses when I am getting unlucky, but that is pretty subjective admittedly. Note: As one small addendum, if you followed my previous post on DW frost, you also know that DW builds require less hit (as weird as that sounds) than 2h builds due to the blessing that is Nerves of Cold Steel (+3% hit, +15% offhand dmg), making the soft hit cap for DW Frost 162 hit rating. In place of this 100 hit, you could perhaps fit 100 expertise, lowering your parry ratio by another ~3%, making DW Frost DK Tanks take 1.5% less damage than their traditional tank counterparts. However, this comes with a very hard trade off: Spell misses. I talked earlier about the 600 attacks DW DK's throw in 5 minutes, well there are some attacks missing from that: Icy Touch and Howling Blast. These are spells and as such are subject to the 17% or 446 hit rating (14%/367 with Virulence). Additionally, Dark Command and Death Grip also fall under spell hit. Dropping your hit to 162 hit rating, you will miss with spells approximately 13% of the time (10% with virulence). As such, your milage may vary with this new emphasis on expertise. However, this should not prevent you from stacking a bit of expertise when you can stand it, as getting as little as 50 points of expertise will lower the difference between DW and 2h tanking to less than 1%. Also, if you are the type to play with talent tree variations, picking up Veteran of the Third War will put 6 full points of expertise in your pocket and put you 1/4th of the way to the soft cap of 26 (where dodge is no longer affected). Lastly, Orc DK's have 5 points of expertise while wielding axes. The two DW tanking weapons for us: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/serilas/]Serilas, Blood Blade of Invar One-Arm [/url] and [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/broken_promise/]Broken Promise [/url]. If you see other 2.6+ speed weapons with def/dodge/parry, please feel free to add a comment. Calculations: *All numbers sourced: [url=http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-combat_ratings_level_80_a/ ]Elitist Jerks[/url] **Parry Haste Bosses have 14% parry, 6.5% dodge *Soft expertise cap (where dodge disappears) is 26. *Hard expertise cap (where dodge and parry go away) is 42 (unattainable for DK). - Expertise Rating: 32.78998947 ER to 4 Expertise. [8.19749 to 1] - Expertise: reduces chance to be dodge/parried by .25% per full expertise point up to 6.5% dodge, 14% parry - Which means you will be parried 14% of the time with 0 expertise. - Avg boss fight: 5 mins -- avg strikes that can be parried per min: 120 for dw, 47 for 2h. -- Rotation: 10 attacks / 20 seconds parriable, auto attack @ 2.6 x 2, vs auto attack @ 3.6 x 1. -- means 600 attacks over avg boss fight for dw, 235 for 2h. -- means 84 parries for dw, 33 for 2h. - avg boss attacks 2 seconds apart. (300 attacks in 5 mins) -- worst case dw dmg (full 40% haste): increases boss dmg by 11% (34 extra attacks)- 84 * .4 = 33.6 extra attacks. -- worst case 2h dmg (full 40% haste): increases boss dmg by 5% (13 extra attacks)- 33 * .4 = 13.2 extra attacks -- Actual difference is really 5.5% more dw dmg, 2.5% more 2h dmg. - 100 exp Rating (3.04% dodge/parry reduction) : The point at which dw and 2h are even if 2h has no expertise. ** Loss of Stone Gargoyle - 565 Def Cap -> 540 Def Cap == 25 extra def over cap * .0118 = .295% dodge/parry by lowered cap. - 565 w/ dw frost is still possible, but will be affected by 540 DR, which means the 25 def buys you .3066% d/p == 1/((.021275)+(.956/.295)) = 1/(.021275+3.241) = 1/3.26195 = .3066% dodge/parry.

[img]http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/hellfire_speed_run/hellfire_speed_run-title.jpg[/img] Ever since I saw [url=http://www.alteracvolley.com/speed-run-hellfire-ramparts/]Nance's Hellfire Ramparts speed challenge post[/url] [and [url=http://www.stabilizedeffortscope.com/?p=884]Rilgon[/url] and [url=http://www.qqpewpew.com/2009/07/28/hellfire-ramparts-speed-clear/]Drotara[/url] follow ups ], I've been curious about exactly how well a DK would stack up for this particular feat of strength. 14:27. A full minute plus behind Rilgon's 13:14. Not bad for a first try with my DK as 13/55/3 dw frost gladiator spec. I started out a bit too shy, I think. By the end, I was pulling entire rooms simultaneously. Such as the last area where the Y is (left is Nazan, right is Omor) and there are five pulls. I pulled that in two parts, one massive pull that missed the few on the right side of the door and then the clean up pull. Following Nance's rules: * Start the timer the second you walk inside. * You have to kill everything inside. * You have to loot everything inside. Skinning is optional. (I am not a skinner) * Stop the timer the second you walk outside. [b]DK Speed Running Tricks[/b]: - Blood will probably win a lot of these speed running challenges since you can move along and heal on your own. - If you're not blood, being in blood pres with huge howling blasts was healing me for quite a bit when I was fighting 10+ mobs. - Don't forget Death Pact. Several times, I finished pulling huge packs and was only down at half life, sac'ing the pet put me back at ~100% and let me chain pull most of this instance. The small cooldown is oh so sweet. I think if I had incorporated the healing tricks into my routine earlier, I could trim 2 minutes off this time [I sat to eat three times]. However, I felt the need to be honest and post a first run, as the others have also done. While I didn't fraps this run, I did take pictures at every boss mob just to show where I was at, notice how long it takes (even with nitro boosts) to get out of the damned instance: wow. [url=http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/hellfire_speed_run/hellfire_speed_run_1.jpg]Entrance[/url] [url=http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/hellfire_speed_run/hellfire_speed_run_2.jpg]Watchkeeper[/url] [url=http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/hellfire_speed_run/hellfire_speed_run_3.jpg]Omor[/url] [url=http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/hellfire_speed_run/hellfire_speed_run_4.jpg]Nazan[/url] [url=http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/hellfire_speed_run/hellfire_speed_run_5.jpg]Exit w/ time[/url]

I went home for lunch today, intending to fish and eat a sammich while catching up on ESPN. However, as soon as I got settled in, I knew I was in for a treat. An old former guildie of mine messages me saying "Hey, wanna come tank Sarth+3d for me?" I was like "Sure!". I have to say that fight is a lot of fun as the only tank. Managing CD's while dodging flame waves, tanking Sarth and his three pals, keeping whelps and fire elems off dps/healers, and managing to not get yourself killed in the meantime. It's a full deck of responsibilities that lands firmly on the shoulders of the tank. I'm glad I was up for the job. Victory [img]http://www.phreakre.com/images/screenshots/Achieve-Sarth_with_3d_10man.jpg[/img] Thanks for the invite, Baba.

Some of you may have noticed my arena teams changed at the end of season six. A late edition called "MyWifeWantsToArenaLOL" happened in the second to last week of the season. Well, actually, it's not a joke. She has finally decided to try her hand at arena-lock. As any other warcraft husband would, I immediately formed a team [with a name which informs the enemy of exactly what they are up against] and proceeded to queue. After two weeks of 20% win ratios (4-16), I was actually fairly happy with the result: 522 arena points, enough for her to buy two pieces of gear without me having to help farm out another 60k honor. However, this got me thinking: [b]why are we winning any games at all[/b]? So, being the sort that likes a challenge and having been burned out on arena before [season 2 and 3 gladiator w/ my rogue]. I decided to issue both myself and my wife a wholesome challenge: 2000 rating in the 2v2 bracket. In so doing, I can explore the various abilities of a death knight to take on two opponents at the same time [as is happening right now], to hopefully document some of the more noteworthy discoveries, and to possibly turn my wife into a face-rolling murder machine. Right now, she is anything but. Wrong spec, wrong clothes, wrong pet? She was running arena with me as [url=http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=9&tal=000000000000000000000000000003220030003000000000000000005203205210331051335230351]0/13/58 PvE destruction[/url]. Just a blast, blast, blast spec that seems to have a lot of damage and no survivability built into it that I can find (or shadowfury). Combine that with the fact that she has not a single piece of PvP gear and was running around with the imp out for the first few games and you'll start to appreciate exactly the predicament I have entered myself into (did I mention she hit lvl 80 with this warlock two weeks ago?). Still, my wife is a smarty pants that learns fast and can do just about anything she puts her mind too, so I have high hopes for season seven. Plus, she's been playing warlock her whole WoW career, so it's not like I have to teach her where the fear button is. My situation is slightly better. I have a full set of deadly armor from my prior endeavors and have been honor capped for quite a while. My 522 arena points went into 5 honor tokens [for 10k honor] to spend on the new bracer/belt/cape/neck when it comes out next week. I plan to arena as [url=http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=6&tal=2305300000000000000000000000023253013522031023010331013510300000000000000000000000000000]13/55/3 DW PvP Frost[/url] with endless winter and icy reach though I might change that to [url=http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=6&tal=0000000000000000000000000000023250012002000000000000000002302323300002152233101203103151]0/17/54 classic unholy arena build[/url] with AMZ/Ebon Plaguebringer and glyphs of Ghoul/SS/DD. I anticipate we will have problems with a few match-ups: - Rogue/Rogue: She's dead so fast that I don't know what advice to give her. Trinket the stun? Then she's chain blinded while I take the beating. Don't trinket the stun and she's dead before DR even starts. If I take the beating, I trinket stun after she's in blind, then I can IBF and hopefully fend them off for a bit, but I just don't see me winning DK vs 2 rogues, even with them taking a GCD to re-CC her. This might just be a loss. - DK/Pally Healer [of some sort]: Nightmare. All of my tools plus a pocket healer that can go immune to burst. If someone has a nice way to lure the paladin into using HS, I'm all ears, but this just seems futile without a MS effect. Not to mention this is a high percentage matchup considering there are 5001 DK/Pal 2v2 teams in my group. - DPS/Tree Druid: Right now, tree druids are just immortal. I can't take one down alone and she doesn't live long enough to help me. I think this might just be a "Learn to control the felhunter better" matchup that will get easier as we coordinate our CC's and interrupts better. - Caster/Caster: If it's warlock/warlock, easy fight. If it's Mage/ElemSham, she's dead so fast I can't figure out what went wrong (sensing a trend here?). I'm a DK, master of caster disaster, and two of our wins were against F.Mage/Caster pairs where she died to the alpha strike and I basically 2v1'd the pair. If it's caster/S.Priest, fergetaboutit, he drops out to heal after she dies and I'm left beating a gimpy healer and some dps class with suddenly extended life. - D.Priest/Rogue: One of us dies to the initial rogue attack. Not much I can do about it except peel, peel, peel and hope we burn down the priest fast enough. Again, this might get easier as she learns felhunter control and I stop being such a bad magician with strangulate. However, that rogue damage is pretty bad ass against both of us right now. Season Six rating: 170. We could only do better next season considering the minimum rating to start losing points.

One aspect of the game has not changed in five years: healing. Healers remain the least played facet of Warcraft. There are several reasons why but, lets face it, healing is boring. While the rest of us have been doing double back flip splits kicks spiking enemies for huge digits, the healers have been playing the same game since Lucifron first got pulled: - Watch grid/healbot/ezhealer and heal the guy taking the most incoming dps. - Occasionally throw a dispel. - Otherwise go flip to the season pass of the View while spamming Shieldbreakr with phat heals to keep his scrawny ass alive through Frozen Blows/Shockblast/Fusion Punch. Fortunately for you cloth wearing sissies (healadins wear tampons?), I have my thinking cap on and I have tuned it to help fix your woes. Healers can be fixed in four easy steps: 1) Proactive Healing Right now, healing is entirely reactive. Xxhitmanxx stands in fire and runs around waiting for a healer to put him out. Shieldbreakr gets his face beat in by Ignis and needs a bandaid. Vornak drank some bad booze and needs a tums. The healers are constantly watching the addons and not the game. Proactive healing means more than anticipating the next three seconds of damage but figuring out what the best use of your talents is for the next 30 seconds to a minute. Imagine if you could throw shields on people like a disc priest and maintain them with shield specific healing? All of a sudden warrior HP [now passing 50k] means less than warrior dodge, block, parry, and sometimes even dps. This means tanking becomes more about threat and dps than about sitting there soaking damage while doing half of what everyone else is doing. It means block, dodge, and parry become the statistics of a tank [even more than they do now]. This creates a proactive environment for the healers and conversely creates a reactive environment for the tanks by making more "on block/dodge/parry" events than just rune striking. (More on pvp implications in a moment). 2) AoE Healing Instead of smart cast AoE healing like circle of healing, healing chain lightning [whatever the shaman spell is called ^^], or bacon, you are responsible for healing a zone. It is the players responsibility to get their ass into your safe zone while you channel your aoe healing/shielding spell. Now we need healers in with the melee, out with the ranged, and not just click spamming heals with the help of grid. Moving the healing zones around, out of the fire, away from the spin up, or onto the loose snow where everyone dodges flash freeze becomes a higher priority. We bring situational awareness into the healer's realm and reward them for being good players. This also incorporates into my next idea.. 3) Combat Medics Any healer's chief job is to keep people alive. Why does a paladin wear plate other than because we have a healer of every armor type? Because he is expected to be hit! Right now, paladins are struggling to find their place in the healing trenches. They have bacon, which helps, and they bring some big heals, but still many are complaining that they need a new niche. Give paladins a skill like death grip, but make it only work on friendly players. Instead of yanking an enemy away from his target and taunting it onto you, it yanks a friendly player next to a paladin and into his zone of healing. Great for that one dipshit that won't move out the damned fire or for rescuing a beat up hunter being snared while on Mimiron Firefighter attempts. Allow paladins to drag dead player bodies and res them during combat with an excessively long cast time [> 10 seconds]. This makes the raid set up triage zones, think about positioning, and makes healadins have a very special job in raiding: rescuing the fallen. It gives healadins a reason to use divine shield outside of "omg, I'm about to get burnt alive". It makes Paladins more like leaders, moving people around, setting up safe zones, shielding those who need it, and ressing the dead. It also doesn't rob Druids of their combat res ability, because theirs is faster, effective outside of resto-spec druids, and has a longer cooldown. Combat Res is preferred to Combat Medic Res. It is just faster.This also means bosses can get much much nastier. Instant kills where Blizzard balances the combat expecting players to get munched up if they miss time a boss ability or stand in the fire even slightly. The long combat medic res also means enrage timers still mean something. The paladin can only res 6 people per minute if they're all standing next to him. 4) Player controlled Healing Assist Light Well was a good start, but it didn't go far enough in my opinion. Healers need to provide the raiders with the capability for on-demand healing. By running to a healer, I should be able to get some more healing through his healing zone, but also they should provide more "healthstone" like healing items. This frees up the healer for doing proactive work and for doing dps. No longer are the priests and restodruids standing off in the corner like shunned exiles throwing heals and only seeing bosses after they flop over. They are in the mix, standing with the ranged and melee, throwing spells to heal and damage alike. So, there you have it. Shieldbreakr' s fix for the healing community. Now you can join the rest of us in rotation-based hell. Side Note: Shielding would have to be disabled for pvp. Stacking a warrior up ready to take raid boss damage would make a healer manditory on every single arena and BG team out there. This would break one of the "sacred pvp rules" that Blizzard has with regards to balance right now. They want healing working the same in pvp and pve. However, I fail to see why. They already changed CC many times, it already works differently on mobs and players. Resilience changed how damage works in pvp, burst was tuned down , dots were tuned down, and now all incoming damage is being reduced by resilience. Healing should be changed. Right now, healers are too powerful. With minor changes, they become too weak and under capable [ala Season 2]. By implementing my plan, we introduce even more arena viable setups that take advantage of the healing zones, of protective death grip, and the possibility of combat res'd opponents if the healer isn't dealt with. It makes healers a force to be reckoned with without making them over powered.

With lots of blue quotes floating around lately about them "looking at" or "rethinking" the problem of Armor Pen, I started to do some research concerning the viability of DW frost DPS ( [url=http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=0000000000000000000000000000320053503520030123000330013512302003050030000000000000000000&glyph=171318000000&version=10192]0/53/18[/url] ) as an alternative to the ArP stacking 2h Blood that seems to run the DK DPS world right now. Since 6xIT machine gun got nerfed, there has not been a real acceptance of dw frost as a dps spec in my raids until I have rolled in and shown them what dw frost can do with two bad weapons ( 2x [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/40491/hailstorm/]Hailstorm[/url] ). I have since upgraded my MH to [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45463/vulmir-the-northern-tempest/]Vulmir, the Northern Tempest[/url] and hope to get a matching one before long. It has been my experience that getting good dw frost one-handers is easier than pulling a good two hander out of an instance. The bosses are just easier and the competition is generally less. For most 2h'ers, you are rolling against arms and fury warriors, retadins, other death knights, possibly hunters, and now druids on polearms. I don't know about the population of your raids lately, but I am seeing a lot of red and pink names. At this point, it feels like half of the horde is wearing plate and I have yet to fight the alliance where at least two paladins weren't cross healing each other between insane spike ret dps. Since DW Frost prefers slower [2.5+ spd] weapons (scroll down for numbers), your competition drops drastically: enh shamen, combat rogues (who only want one slow weapon), and other dw frost dk's. On top of that, some good one handers drop off some of the easier bosses: [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47508/aledars-battlestar/]Aledar's Battlestar[/url] drops in 5 man H-ToC (though in 2 weeks I have yet to see one), [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45298/razorscale-talon/]Razorscale Talon[/url] from Razorscale-25 normal mode, [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45463/vulmir-the-northern-tempest/]Vulmir[/url] drops off Thorim-25 regular mode, and let us not forget the Furious Gladiator line of slow weapons (Higher end raiders might consider [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/46097/caress-of-insanity/]Caress of Insanity[/url] from Yogg-10 HM). So you are rolling on good weapons usable by less people, making more drops matter to your raid and decreasing the shard count of your guild bank. Not to mention there are more 2.5+spd one handers in the game than non-hunter two-handers right now. The rotation is the same as it has always been for frost: IT > PS > OB > BS > BS > Dump; OB > OB > dump > OB; repeat while weaving in FS as rune power dictates. If you are applying the 2SR and weaving in rime procs, your DPS is better than it was in 3.1 as 2h Frost. It is interesting that this is also your tanking rotation [with RS toggled in when up], it means that when you are tanking, you are just dps'ing the boss from the front while keeping an eye out for proper cooldown application. The more you run this rotation, the more second nature it becomes, the higher the dps or threat you can put out while concentrating on what makes boss fights hard for your average person: situational awareness, movement, and being ready to use those not-so-average abilities to their highest. I have found I can run this rotation without thinking about it and it has boosted my raid dps greatly on fights like Mim and Hodir where movement is pretty key and keeping your dps up is the mark of a good raider. Additionally, DW Frost gives you ~99hit rating back in the form of other stats. Instead of 263, your hit cap is now 164 [with Nerves of Cold Steel 3/3]. I do not see any DW Frost specs that can be taken seriously w/o 3/3 NoCS considering the 15% offhand damage bonus comes with the hit. Turning that 99 hit into 99 str is a DPS bonus no matter which way you cut it [~70dps] that scales with BoK and other raid buffs. Some have stated that DW Frost needs more hit, not less, compared to the 2h alternatives, but that has not been displayed either in sim data or raid parses. Every +str you trade for +hit rating seems to cost you ~.8dps until you hit the main hand hit cap of 164 [with 3/3 NoCS]. Given the rise to 104 hit on the T9 sets, you are already using your yellow sockets for something besides hit so long as your other items are around the same iLvl. At 219, it is easy to hit 300+ hit just in items alone, not to mention gem selection. This changes the itemization priority slightly to Hit ( < 165) > Exp (soft cap) > Str > ArP > Crit > Haste > Spell Hit > AP. In most gear realities, unless you are experimenting with different gem layouts like me, you can almost ignore those [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/40125/rigid-kings-amber/]Rigid King's Amber[/url] and just pile on [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/40111/bold-cardinal-ruby/]Bold Cardinal Ruby[/url] into every socket available. Where dw frost will drop in comparison to blood is on fights with more than one target at a time. You can't beat the free blood cleave damage. To me, the blood cleave dps style is very beneficial to a raid, it just requires the right mindset and strategy, like all good DK dps builds. Maximizing your blood damage is a matter of having cooperating tanks dragging mobs together and knowing when to start blowing your cooldown chains, but that is another post. Fortunately, there are a lot of single target dps boss fights in Uld and ToC. I expect to see more in Icecrown, but who really knows at this point? For my money, dw frost dps is a lot of fun to play, and who knows, perhaps at some point there might actually be a death knight holding Frostmourne, as it should be. Side note: For gladiators, DW Frost provides a unique blend of control and pressure while maintaining that good ol' frost burst damage that got killed so badly in 2h frost's nerf. If you were running a burst frost team pre-3.2, you are probably running with a DW dk right now at similar ratings. Some gladiators have reported that dw frost suffers against plate classes but makes clothies easier. Disc priests are just as hard as before, same for resto-druids and shamen. Sim Results ( [url=http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t50274-kahories_dk_simulator_beta_1_0_a/]Kahorie's DK Sim 1.0 beta[/url] ) *Sample character was average 219 character with some uld25 raid experience. 2pc T8.5, access to Uld 10 and ToC-5 [w/o HM's]. * DW Spec: [url=http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=0000000000000000000000000000320053503520030123000330013512302003050030000000000000000000&glyph=171318000000&version=10192]0/53/18[/url] * Blood Spec: [url=http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#jfVMVh0Icfkf0stZfzhhxc:IpGMmV]51/0/20[/url] * All sims done in Blood and Unholy presence, but blood came out on top for every situation, so I am only listing blood presence dps. Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45463/vulmir-the-northern-tempest/]Vulmir, the Northern Tempest[/url] - 7736 dps Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47508/aledars-battlestar/]Aledar's Battlestar[/url] - 7551 dps Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45142/remorse/]Remorse[/url] - 7342 dps Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45331/rune-etched-nightblade/]Rune-etched Nightblade[/url] - 7243 dps Vulmir MH/Remorse OH - 7581 dps Aledar MH/Rune-etched OH - 7444 dps. [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45165/worldcarver/]Worldcarver[/url] - 7078 dps [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45282/ironsoul/]Ironsoul[/url] - 6678 dps * Hit was scaled based on 5 +20 Str gems vs 5 +20 Hit gems. 1 Hit : 1 Str tradeoffs. As you can see, until main hand hit cap, dps goes up. Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45463/vulmir-the-northern-tempest/]Vulmir, the Northern Tempest[/url] - 144 Hit - 7531 dps Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45463/vulmir-the-northern-tempest/]Vulmir, the Northern Tempest[/url] - 164 Hit - 7736 dps Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45463/vulmir-the-northern-tempest/]Vulmir, the Northern Tempest[/url] - 263 Hit - 7699 dps Dual [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45463/vulmir-the-northern-tempest/]Vulmir, the Northern Tempest[/url] - 303 Hit - 7666 dps [url=http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/45165/worldcarver/]Worldcarver[/url] - Blood spec - 310 ArP - 263 Hit - 7077 dps